Well, here’s a good reason not to write off Joost quite yet: When the London-based company officially debuts its new Web-based service in mid-October, it will have some pretty hot content with its half-dozen seasons of the former NBC hit, “Friends.”

Also, there will finally be no more irksome plug-ins.

In other words, anyone with an Internet connection can watch streaming television shows and movies on Joost, with advertising embedded in various forms.

There will also be social-networking elements–you can see what your friends watch and form groups, make comments with cool tools and the rest of that sort of thing.

While all this is not going to make up for the lost time the online video service has wasted with its annoying P2P-based desktop client download, going to a Web-based, all-Flash service with more robust content is certainly the right way to stop rival service Hulu from continuing to clean Joost’s clock.

Joost was first out of the gate last year with a giant slug of funding, fancy founders (Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström, who were also founders of Web phenoms Skype and Kazaa) and blue-chip investors (Sequoia Capital, Index Ventures, as well as CBS, Viacom and wealthy Hong Kong investor Li Ka-shing).

In any case, Hulu quickly grabbed the lead in terms of press praise (I ate my words even!), ease-of-use and, most importantly, user numbers.

In the most recent stats, for example, Hulu had more than 100 million monthly video streams and 3.3 million unique monthly visitors. (But since Joost has just soft-launched its new Web-only service, it’s hard to make comparisons just yet, although the competition is now clearly afoot!)

And, although it has been written off by some, I do not think it is too late for Joost.

First, it is still early in the premium online video game.

Second, success will depend on having increasing amounts of quality content. And Joost–with CBS, Warner Bros., Sony and other unusual content like anime–certainly can keep up with Hulu’s programs from its partner parents, News Corp. (News Corp. is the owner of Dow Jones and this Web site) and NBC Universal.

Lastly, despite decent consumer uptake, the business is still in its nascent popcorn-stand stage of revenue and profit generation.

And while spending too much money and having too many employees did not help Joost, it seems as though CEO Mike Volpi has finally gotten control of the start-up beast.

Thus, while in London this week, I stopped in at the offices of Joost (near the famed King’s Cross train station, where, of course–to no avail–I tried to make it through the wall at Platform 9 3/4!) to chat with Volpi about all the changes at the much-hyped company.

Here’s a longish video, in which the always-well-turned-out former Cisco exec talks about all that and more:

The Samwer brothers of Germany have agreed to invest $10 million to $15 million in the hot social-networking site, a development which was first reported by Reuters and TechCrunch.

It feels like an awfully small amount to garner a key Facebook relationship in the important European market, so I would expect more to come.

A lot of people have doubted Facebook’s ability to raise more money after getting a lofty $15 billion valuation following a $240 million investment from Microsoft in October of 2007, which made the stakes very high.

And, indeed, the personal investment by the well-known European entrepreneurs comes after some time has passed since the last investment in Facebook in late November by Chinese investor Li Ka-shing of $60 million and possibly $60 million more, which was first reported here.

By coincidence, after meeting him at a dinner hosted by Accel Partners–a Facebook investor, in fact–in London in December, I am planning to visit with Marc Samwer next week in Berlin. Marc, with his brothers Alexander and Oliver, founded a German online auction site that was later sold to eBay and now run the European Founders Fund.

So, as they say over there: Ausgezeichnet!

CBS’s “60 Minutes” will air its Facebook piece on Sunday, and BoomTown is curious to see what take the iconic new magazine show will have on the hot and hyped social network and its founder, Mark Zuckerberg.

In clips it has released, Zuckerberg tells veteran correspondent Lesley Stahl that its stalkerish ad product Beacon–a half-baked ad scheme Facebook cooked up that sends information about your purchases on partner Web sites back to your profile on the service–needs work.

Really? I had no idea! Oh, wait, I did.

Zuckerberg goes on to assure Stahl and the viewing public that Beacon will be a good tool someday. “It might take some work for us to get this exactly right,” said Zuckerberg in the interview. “This is something we think is going to be a really good thing.”

Since the 23-year-old is no Martha Stewart, we would like to take his word for it, but will not for now.

Zuckerberg also tells Stahl not to expect an IPO in 2008–well, I was not expecting one, but thanks for the confirmation–meaning that Facebook would have to make do with the $300 million it recently got from Microsoft and Chinese rich man Li Ka-shing for small stakes in the company.

The investments, as faithful BoomTown readers know, gave Facebook an insane $15 billion valuation. Despite the start-up’s fast growth and impressive record of building a pretty good service, I hope Stahl gives that wacky number her patented dubious eyebrow raise she always throws at various and sundry midrange dictators talking democracy.

We’re also interested in seeing the piece for you’re-so-vain reasons, because I was also interviewed by Stahl for the segment.

No surprise, Stahl asked if I was biased because of my partner, the Google exec (see my voluminous disclosure about that and more here), and because Rupert Murdoch now owned both Facebook rival MySpace and Dow Jones (owner of this site).

Well, no to both, since I was slapping around Facebook long before Google declared Open Social war on it and also before News Corp. was our corporate pooh-bah (also, the idea of me doing Rupe’s social-networking dirty work is laughable).

But most of the interview was about the many challenging issues I and others have raised about Facebook. In her lean-forward style, Stahl asked me a range of questions, mostly having to do with my many pieces on the start-up and Zuckerberg.

An old pro at the shake-up game, she noted at the start that some had called me “nasty” and “mean” for my sharpish reporting on Facebook.

I confess! I confess! It’s all true!

That is, if by mean, Stahl meant my thinking the valuation was undeserved thus far, raising questions about the need for a magic business plan to support that valuation and, of course, my wondering if Zuckerberg was experienced enough to be Facebook’s CEO.

Then, of course you can call me Cruella De Poke.

How I wish CBS–paging Quincy Smith!–would allow embedding of its videos, but here is a link to one clip from the interview where Zuckerberg talks about Beacon. And here is another about Zuckerberg’s wacky days as a hacker at Harvard.

The show airs at 7 p.m.

That’s because, although it has been widely reported, the hot social network will not fall under the Securities and Exchange Commission’s old “500 shareholder rule,” which would have forced it to report such information when the number of shareholders, including those holding just stock options, reached 500.

While companies like Google got caught in that net several years ago, the SEC actually recently changed that rule to exempt those just holding options, which the vast majority of Facebook’s growing legion of employees (about 400) have been given.

In fact, said many sources, Facebook only has several dozen individual shareholders who actually own stock and that number is unlikely to rise in the future.

That’s because new employees, for example, since the start-up’s recent $300-million financing that put its valuation at $15 billion, will be getting mostly “RSUs,” or restricted stock units–grants of stock valued in terms of company stock, which are not issued until later.

These units are essentially a promise that employees will receive stock in the future, but frees them from vexing tax problems such as alternative minimum tax issues.

That also means few will be able to sell any Facebook stock until there is an actual liquidation event, such as an IPO, which company investors like Peter Thiel of the Founders Fund have said would not occur until at least 2009.

Until then, don’t expect much selling from major owners, such as CEO and Founder Mark Zuckerberg, who owns 20% of the company outright and has options representing another 7%.

While it’s a good story to imagine them trying to hedge their bets on the future of Facebook, many sources have told me neither Zuckerberg nor other top execs have done so.

So Valleywag’s Owen Thomas (pictured here in this lovely self-portrait) was right to retract his story over the weekend about Zuckerberg selling $40 million worth of his own shares in the massive financing the company recently got from Microsoft and Asian billionaire Li Ka-sing.

I was in the unusual position of getting the story sent to me by Thomas on my Blackberry Friday night, while at a holiday party that Zuckerberg was also attending.

So what did I do? Well, shove the device in Zuckerberg’s face, of course!

Zuckerberg took a look at the story and quickly denied cashing out in any way, saying to me: “Well, that’s just not true at all.”

In yet another bizarre Yuletide twist, I was headed to the Valleywag party right after that, so I told Owen–who was looking dapper in tux and red shades–that reaction (well, I kind of yelled it at him, to be honest, starting with a festive “Oops, you’re wrong!”).

In other words, it was too good to be true. And, as readers of this column know, so will Facebook’s valuation be until it garners those hoped-for advertising revenues to back up the big numbers.

The 79-year-old Li (pictured here) is the chairman of Cheung Kong Holdings Limited and Hutchison Whampoa Limited, a conglomerate with 250,000 employees worldwide. His businesses are especially tied to Hong Kong, where he has massive investments in telecommunications, real estate, electricity, retail, shipping and the Internet.

According to sources, Li is not making the investment in Facebook via the companies he controls, but through another investment entity. He also has the right to invest another $60 million in Facebook.

Li has plenty of cash to do that–he is considered the richest man in Asia and was named the ninth richest person in the world by Forbes last March, with wealth valued at $23 billion.

He built that fortune from humble beginnings–his family fled mainland China when he was a boy. Li, who dropped out of school at 15 after the death of his father, started his career as a worker-laborer in a plastics company.

Facebook, according to sources, is still planning on raising more investment dollars, although some once-hot prospects, such as Providence Equity Partners, have dropped out due to the onerous terms Facebook has demanded from investors.

While both Microsoft and Li have agreed, for example, Providence was put off by the lack of downside protection and also the fact that a major investment in Facebook would not get them a seat on the board of the start-up. Neither Microsoft nor Li will get a Facebook board seat.

The deal with Li came through a Facebook investor, who introduced the company to Solina Chau, director of the Li Ka-shing Foundation. Chau is also a major stockholder in Tom.com, a media company in China in which Li’s companies also have an interest. His investment might give Tom a leg up in possible partnerships with Facebook in China, said sources.