Back in the early days of Joost we had a downloadable client. Back in those “old” days we also used to have something called “widgets”. Times have changed, but widgets are still an interesting concept, thus we’ve been toying around with widgets in our Flash based player.
Here is an example Twitter search widget:
It’s a pretty basic example of a widget that uses the underlying video’s metadata to search on Twitter for things related to the video and display tweets on top of it.
Technically widgets are separate SWF files that are loaded by the Joost Player and displayed on top of the video. The Joost Player then exposes a simple API to the widgets:
- video metadata: title, description, duration, etc
- current time in the video, meaning that time based interaction is possible
- ability to play/pause videos
That means that anything you can do in Flash, you can do in a widget plus you can access information about the underlying video.
We’ll be posting an alpha version of the “Widget API” soon, so this is just a teaser so far 
[...] that it is going to allow third-party developers to add Flash widgets to its video player soon. The Joost Labs blog this week previewed a widget that adds keyword-based Twitter search results to a video. Joost wants to eventually release a [...]