Boxee is a funky hybrid of an application: an open source, cross-platform media center and entertainment hub with social networking features.

Sound like a mouthful of jumbled buzzwords? Suffice it to say that Boxee is a promising (if currently slightly klunky) application that lets AppleTV users (and PC, Mac, and other multimedia devices) watch and listen to interesting content, and share preferences with others via different social media like Tumblr, FriendFeed, and Twitter. The program takes your movies, music, and photos, adds to it the artwork, reviews, and trailers for those media. It also lets you stream online content (last.fm, Hulu, YouTube, etc.) as well on your computer or HDTV.

The recent AppleTV 2.3 upgrade broke Boxee. An update has restored Boxee for use with AppleTV.  Boxee notes on its blog that ~35,000 people are already using the application. That strongly suggests a large audience of Apple TV owners who want broader content choices. Users like us would like Apple to open up the Apple TV to third-party apps and content, like they did with the iPhone and the App Store.

multimedia-pcs.com says “I think Boxee is a great product.  I’m thinking about buying an AppleTV just to run Boxee.  When you have developers that ontop of a situation, you start to understand their dedication to their product.  They just received 4 million in funding and they deserve every dime of that.  Keep up the good work.”

For our part, we’ve found Boxee kind of kludgey to install and update, but we have enjoyed being able to actually watch and listen to streaming content, as well as our non-DRM’ed media, on our comfortable couch with the TV, rather than crowding around the Mac Mini in the office.

Boxee plans on releasing a set-top box to run its programs sometime in 2009.