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Jook is both. According to Wikipedia Jook is a type of rice porridge eaten in many Asian countries, but thats not the Jook I’ll write about.

Jook was announced on the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas a couple of days ago and it caught my attention immediately. If the Jook can pull this off social networking is on the street, in the train or sub, in the park or on a plane. It’s everywhere.

So what is Jook?

Basically Jook is a standard for creating music player accessories that lets everyone, regardless of the mp3 music player being used, broadcast their songs to the people around them. An example could be: You are sitting on the train. The girl opposite of you is listening to songs or a podcast on her iPod. You broadcast your favourite song to her from your cell phone or Creative Zen. She falls in love with you, you marry her, win $1,000,000 and live happily ever after. Another example: You are outside playing live role play with four of your friends. You broadcast the theme song from Lord Of The Rings from your Zune to their Nokia N82, Creative Zen, iPod and Sony Ericsson W910i. You all feel very orcish and manage to slay the good guys.

Of course the examples are just imaginary, I mean who feels orcish?! Jook however is real and you can actually broadcast your songs or tune in to another Jook-user who is broadcasting.

So how does Jook work?

Jook has three modes settings as illustrated below.

“Me” mode: The white Jook button. You use your mp3-players normally and in privacy.

“Us” mode: The button pulses a red light to show other Jook-users that your are broadcasting. You can also see who is connected to your broadcast.

“U” mode: Green light indicates that you are looking for a broadcaster. In “U” mode you can connect to Jook users in “Us” mode.

Jook uses the power available in your headphones and broadcast in stereo.

So where does the social networking come in?

I’m glad you asked! Apart from the obvious solution that you could actually take the ear phones out of your ears and talk to each other about the music, Jook also comes with a social networking tool, where you can create your own profile, see who listened to your broadcast, rate other users music, share your playlist and so forth. The usual stuff known from MySpace, Facebook and last.fm. You can also share your personal information, cell phone number and webpage.

So will it work?

I hope it will. However for it to work mp3-player and cell phone manufacturers has to believe in the standard too. I guess Jook could manufacture their own ear buds and headphones, but it won’t be a huge success unless it comes bundled with a new iPod, Zen, Zune or Nokia phone. Its a great way to promote your band instead of the usual MySpace-way.

According to several gadget-site the look of the end-product may vary. I doubt Jook will have much success with the headphones and huge adapter connected to the player. It’s still a new product, so I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt. Zune-users might also say that they already broadcast music, but that requires a Zune, so that won’t help any iPod or cell phone users.

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