why we made boxee social
boxee was born out of necessity. we were frustrated by solutions from Microsoft, Apple and others. we spent long hours brainstorming about what will be the ultimate media center experience. as a first priority we thought it will be nice to have a media center that actually works.. 
 but looking beyond that challenge we came to the conclusion that social should be a big part of the solution.
a truly connected experience means not just connecting people with content, but also connecting people with people. so by making boxee social we believe our users will discover new content, rediscover forgotten favorites, and share experiences with friends, family and the world.
the mobile phone is a social tool, the web is increasingly social, there is no reason for the TV to remain an isolated island.
we have lots of ideas on how to make boxee more social, but would love to get your feedback on what social features you would like to see as part of boxee.
subscribe to blog
join boxee
boxee on twitter
Hi there,
First of all, great initiative! Thanks for taking the time to reach for perfection on Mediacenter experiences.
What I’d like to see is already partly on your wonderfull app. Youtube within boxee, but not just youtube browsing. Most youtube integrations fail to let you log into your own account…why? So here it is, log into your own account so you can waych your own favorites etc.
I don’t have your alpha release, so these two cents are purely based on the discription and screenshots of boxee.
Thanks,
TmiY
@TmiY – indeed. and boxee does let you login and browse your faves
invite coming your way, thanks!
If you are developing a Social Media center you need to not be on computers but in the living room and possibly developing for the Wii because the Wii Remote brings media center accessibility to almost everyone
The Wii is a social entertainment device
http://blog.ffwd.com/?p=38
Roughly speaking… I’m looking for something that brings together web content into a single interface, but facilitates identification of content that I’m most likely to care about… based on explicit preferences, past viewing, recommendations from “friends” and “ranked, trusted referers.” (It could be something like the Navi-X XBMC script, but with decentralized content management, content and referer ranking, categorization and library abstraction, and much improved personal media bookmarking.)
Additionally, I’d like the interface to highlight “recent” content, from the most recent media from select sources (DVRs, podcasts, torrents, etc), but also via alternate “broadcast” mechanisms… such as Twitter tweets, links/attachments in recent emails, Web browser-queued links (’send to boxee’), etc.
In a distributed environment, it is difficult to judge where the functionality should reside, on the media client or on a media server. As the number of clients grows in a home, a central media scrutinizer would become much more critical.
I’m loving the boxee concept. And I think the social aspect is going to help make the media center concept a much easier sell to the significant others that may not always share our enthusiasm for such “necessities” of life.
The way that you make my TV interactive is by giving me the ability to chat / text message (or webcam, but that has its own host of issues, mostly hardware related) with my friends and family while I am on the couch. I am on the west coast and most of my family and friends are back east, and my wife’s are in another country – so the ability to chat with them while we are in the living room is very appealing. And this could make sporting events all the more exciting, because the only thing more fun than watching you team win, is taunting your buddies who are cheering for the opponent.
Screenshots seem few and far between, so if you guys made more available it might invite more (and more useful) feedback for those of us waiting patiently to take a test drive.
Good luck!
Andrew
Hi there, first of all thanks for all your great work with the application. The concept looks like it really is potential, can’t wait to try it out.
I think it would be a great feature if I could stream or download content from my friends ‘Boxee’.
And a web portal from where I could manage my setup and media files. An example could be categorizing downloaded torrents (didn’t I saw that Boxee will support torrent downloads?)
One question, when are you sending out more invites? According to the news it should have been this Monday.
Regards,
Ulrik.
@Matt i agree that we need to be on additional platforms. boxee on Wii will be great.
@plooger great idea regarding the different emails, tweets, etc. that the user receives. right now our ‘recently added’ is only showing stuff that was added in the home network. we should expand it to the Internet.
@Andrew text input in the living room has always been a challenge. the on-screen keyboard are very slow to operate and remote controls have not made it easy either..
hopefully someone will come out with a relevant, affordable remote to solve it. there is one small, full qwerty remote that Logitech is now pushing.
people will want to chat (text, voice and video) while using their TV. we will need to see how we tackle this one.
@Ulrik good stuff. love your ideas. sorry you didn’t get an invite, yet. send me an email to avner [at] boxee [dot] tv
and i’ll send you an invitation
Kudos on what looks like really neat software!
If you are interested in porting to an embedded device, we make open, set-top boxes. They run Linux and GPL application software, but think of us as to set-top boxes what Compaq was to computers, open hardware that leverages the body of software out there. We’re a small, quiet, inexpensive target that sits next to the TV. It’s embedded, so it’s not a PC substitute, but cheaper, smaller, more efficient, etc.
http://wiki.neurostechnology.com/index.php/OSD2.0_HD_Platform
bare boards available to developers now, in housings mid July or so. Hope this doesn’t seem like spam, it seemed pertinent to your efforts.
@avner, thanks for the feedback.
Yeah, “recently” should help me get to the latest media, wherever it resides and however it was published. And then “recently” can be sliced-up in many different ways, by media content type; genre; local vs internet; how recently published, etc.
Agreed avner – I think a text input device of some sort will become commonplace as this convergence continues. It’s certainly no secret that tomorrow’s generation prefers conversation by text. And the Logitech one you referenced definitely seems like a step in the right direction.
If you’re still feeling generous: agwsmail [at] gmail [dot] com I’d love to participate and provide real feedback.
@JoeBorn gidon who handles all our BD stuff will reach out to you. would be great to have boxee running on Neuros.
@Andrew just sent you an invite. will be interested to hear what you think. the social features in boxee are just the beginning. we have lots in the pipeline.
@plooger that’s exactly how we have it on our roadmap. the current alpha is only reflecting local media in ‘recently added’. beta version should start to include stuff from the Internet
@JoeBorn, XBMC (the framework core BOXEE builds on) uses the Simple DirectMedia Layer as the hardware API so it could be built to use DirectFB/XDirectFB for graphic acceleration (which I assume Neuros OSD2.0 HD supports), but currently XBMC is only designed to run on a x86 CPU (and also begun being ported to PowerPC) so you would have to port it to run on a ARM CPU.
dcsrizbdqccg ‾
alright, how close do I get to replacing my tivo(s) with tivo desktop on the network that up and downloads to/from the pc? and as with twitter, if you don’t have any tweeting friends, how do I get anything out of this extra piece nailed on of the social network? The biggest problem I can see atm is that I can go from hulu, et al. directly to my tivo. How close is the media center aspect of the experience is in boxee? Is there the attention to details (creeping featurism) in boxee that there is in say SageTV?
Isn’t a social networking media center/player an open invitation to Hollywood to gather intelligence about who has what unlicensed media (and/or is playing or sharing it)? In the litigious environment of DRM-laden video, “illegal” players, “statutory” damages, and mass lawsuits of consumers, why would anybody use a player that reports what they’re doing to ANY central server anywhere?
Or is that boxee’s business plan — be bought by the MPAA after accumulating a nice juicy database? The record companies did >20,000 lawsuits, trying to settle each at $3-5000. If MPAA bought Boxee for $40M, they could double their money just by suing every customer whose records showed they weren’t being good little “streaming clients”.