Okay now this is serious. There's little doubt that YouTube would have won this award in 2006 for proving anyone can create and share short form video thus creating the category of video sharing. Last year the winner was Kaltura who facilitates open source video sharing for the likes of Major League Baseball and the New York Public Library and Creative Commons. Because of company's like Kaltura, the future only holds more video content and distributed across more diverse sources. What we need next to perpetuate the democratization of short form video is to help viewers navigate the impending video explosion, precisely ffwd's mission. Please make a note to vote for us every day and please ask your friends to do the same, because every vote cast helps move history along.

For starters, I just signed a lease on what I've been told was an early Digg office 531 Howard Street, which happens to be across the way from our current office (anyone who needs 1300 loft style space, let me know. i might be able to hook you up). It's a pleasantly, airy space so keep an eye out for the the office warming party next month.

Our reason for moving is also a similarity we have with Digg, we're hiring. We haven't accumulated the war-chest they have, just manged our Series A well enough that the broader economic downturn doesn't effect our focus on continuing to innovate our nascent product category. I heard Digg grew from something like 4 to 40 people while in this office; we'd like to double to 16.

Both our teams are trying reconstructing media spaces that were deconstructed by the advance of digital creation and distribution. Whereas one brand would formerly manage creation and distribution and therefore provided the de-facto service of organizing attention for content, competition among an exploding number of creators and the accessibility of distribution over the Internet requires organization to be provided as a separate service, which Digg provides for news and ffwd is starting to provide for short-form video. Digg is the new front page and ffwd is the only channel your ever need.

That's not to say that ffwd is simply a Digg for video (that's what Digg Video is), easily illustrated by a comparison of pages:

We differ on the level of personalization (ffwd is mass customized, Digg is only for the aggregate audience), presentation of the content (ffwd plays videos in sequence, Digg uses the list view of their news product), and how the content is sourced (ffwd crawls for videos to meet the expectations of our channels' audiences, Digg's audience submits and votes on videos for the entire audience). It's the difference between a personalized adaptive channel and "looking at information through the lens of the collective community on Digg".

That said, I look forward to when our experiement has as much success as Digg has had. More to the point, if we can do for TV what they've done for news, not only would we be fulfilling our mission, we'd also be fulfilling the expectations of our new address.

Our relationships to favorite offline places comprise: visiting often, spending time, making commitments, and bringing or referring friends. These are the measures of success for online places too, often just shrouded in the technocratic language of website analytics: return visits, session length, registrations, and virality.

The drivers in offline places are the people, our hosts, encouraging us to "Come again", "Sit a spell", "take a frequent visitor card" and "Make room at the table". Coffee shops, hotels, retail stores succeed when they package these simple values consistently and the same is true for websites.

For instance, at our recent company off-site (watch the video) we decided to target our product development at increasing returning visits and virality (we already have strong performance in engagement and registrations). The work ahead of us is to work out the equivalent to "come again" and "make room at the table" for next generation television. First generation television was (whether self-aware or not) a hospitality industry too - take "Same Bat time, Same Bat channel" for instance. In a sense the television industry's transition looks like a bizarre world where you once had same chain hotels in every city and suddenly anybody can build a hotel and there is just one giant city. It's mother of all Chance cards in Monopoly.

Our solution? Build a custom hotel for every guest. So expect to see the good people of ffwd roll out reasons for you to come again and make room for your friends over the next few months as we improve your personal hotel (your personal adaptive channel) on the video web.

(First a big thanks to Josh Lowensohn for letting this lowly Mac-not-running-parallels slob check it out on his machine)

Clearly this is the most web-app friendly browser, ever. Whereas Firefox 3 enabled some great new technology (like Feedly), Google's Chrome gives due to all the existing web-app technology by recasting the essential metaphors of the browser from the perspective of web-apps rather than web-sites, for instance stand alone windows and shortcuts for applications. ffwd was designed to be such an app and I'm glad to say it runs great on Google Chrome. How could it not with exceptional support for Javascript and WebKit rendering? However I'm disappointed with one major decision: putting the tabs at the top. Granted the web-application world can feel good about giving the application names top billing in the window, but there would have been far more benefit in moving them to the bottom. If they had been moved to the bottom, then the browser-as-desktop look would have been complete. OS X, Windows, and most flavors of Linux dock active applications at the bottom of the screen. Immaterial of whether that's the best UI (which I happen to think it is), copying it would have reduced resistance tremendously to the adoption of web-apps by desktop users.

Google either did not think about it enough or is cynically trying to make the Omnibar look like it's part of every application. A giant search box just isn't the best first line of navigation for every web app. Don't believe me? Take a look at this screenshot of Yelp with the smallest possible Firefox header.

While Yelp has opted to highlight search lower in the UI. In Chrome (I can only imagine since again I'm a lowly Mac user), there would be an extremely confusing additional search bar given priority above the menus. Furthermore the fact that this Chrome-like minimalism is possible but so uncommonly used in Firefox that it has become a selling point for Chrome is further proof that a more desktop-like default layout is a huge missed opportunity.

Either way I hope Google changes it ASAP, otherwise a huge opportunity for the emerging web application space (that's not internal to Google, anyway) will be lost. Web apps will thrive more if they look as much like desktop apps as possible. So, please Google move everything you can to the bottom of the window, so the  javascript menus you went to great pains to process better will have a shot at thwarting the hegemony of "File Edit etc.".

Our predecessors in the video content industry's transition to digital were recently quoted regarding barriers they are facing to monetization. I was happy to find they map directly to three areas ffwd is innovating. First the quotes:

• "the killer video app will be an intelligent piece of software that creates a mode-sensitive, personalized [program guides]” - Veoh CEO Steve Mitgang
• "The one thing [YouTube] is least good at is the social piece, where users create their own community around a shared interest," imeem CMO Steve Jang
• “consumers...shouldn't have to think about whether it's IPTV, or online video, or cable or whatever. The experience needs to be the same” - Ben Huang, Product Management Director, Microsoft TV

And now our innovation areas and what we've rolled out so far

• connecting the videos - the adaptive sequencing engine
• connecting the audience - passive sharing
• connecting the venues - the Facebook and Wii applications

It's good to know that when we launch, we'll unlock value for the whole ecosystem.

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Ray Ozzie rocks, no doubt about it, but he's evidently not immune from the particularly virulent strain of "blind to the world" endemic to Redmond. Take this bit quoted at Techcrunch: "Just imagine the possibilities enabled by centralized configuration and personalization and remote control of all your devices from just about anywhere. Just imagine the convenience of unified data management..."

Just imagine? Those of us building cross platform web-aps live in that world right now! Our imaginations have long given way to implementation. Right now, you can program your TV via the web using the ffwd service and our first two client application prototypes (the PC client and the Wii client). Soon we'll be adding a mobile client (preview your program choices in transit) and a social client (watch what your friends have or will watch). By the end of this year we plan to have a full featured API that will let developers create clients for ANY standards-based, Internet-enabled device.

He then goes on to talk about "...the transparent synchronization of files, folders, documents, and media. The bi-directional synchronization of arbitrary feeds of all kinds across your devices and the Web, a kind of universal file synch.

Synch? What's there to sync when every device is using the same data repository? The the web-at-large multi-directionally handles its native "documents" (HTML), "folders" (XML feeds), "media" (Embeds) using the "file" system of URLs. Perhaps Microsoft (and now Ray's) problem is that none of those web natives are created using Microsoft software. The simple solution is to include with Vista the equivalent of a dot-Mac account (which I would support if only because it may push Apple to do the same).

So what is so important that I make fun of Microsoft for being blind to it? In the world at large, the PC (personal computer) is dying on two fronts:

1. The primary copy of our new data is more likely to live on a public server that on a personal device (eg. Flickr, YouTube, there isn't won't be even a copy of Facebook data on a PC)
2. The computer is giving way to the Internet-enabled device. The biggest threat to Microsoft's play for the living room isn't Apple, it's the TV manufacturers who are rigging their displays with just enough to get online (btw, this article deserves it's own future post because it best describes the vision of the future ffwd enables).

I think he understood this even a little bit into his experience at Microsoft, but these new statements suggest either he since stopped paying attention, succumb to pressure to quit the Creative Commons nonsense and get on with productizing his ideas, or (and this is the most disturbing) he is building his vision with the PC (or worse, a specific OS) in mind.

Please Mr. Ozzie, for you and us, make this MESH thing conform to the values implied by this as yet unrefined and unofficial war cry of web application developers everywhere.

"give me a standards compliant browser running on good hardware and a light-weight OS and I'll do the rest."

Update April 2008: Microsoft is releasing Live Mesh to a small group,  estimating general beta before 2009

The controversial Wisdom of Crowds concept popularized by New Yorker columnist James Surowiecki has come under fresh criticism. In March  The Economist, Newsweek, Bryan Caplan (author of the Myth of the Rational Voter), and Danny Dover all came out against the idea. Here's a few choice quotes:

The Econmist on Wikipedia: "there is a limit to how much information a group of predominantly non-specialist volunteers, armed with a search engine, can create and edit he Economist on Wikipedia"

Danny Dover on the the fickleness of the mob

Bryan Caplan at SxSW: "The miracle of aggregation fails and it fails very directly."

Newsweek quoting Jason Calcanis: "The wisdom of the crowds has peaked"

These would be damning cases of failure...if they were relevant. In reality, they only illustrate how difficult it is to make a crowd in to a wise crowd because  crowds in general lack one of the following characteristics of a wise crowd: diversity of opinion, independence, decentralization, intelligent aggregation, emotional balance.  To wit, the economist article  is really a bunch of illustration of how Wikipedia  is too centralized and politicizes aggregation. Likewise Danny Dover and Bryan Caplan's criticisms are on failures of emotion or stupid aggregation.

To put it another way, I disagree with both Jason's premise and conclusion. Web 2.0 was not about the wisdom of crowds. It was about crowds genearlly (social networks), a few somewhat wise, but none fully and intentionally so. Therefore, I conclude that Web 3.0 is a race between the return of experts (Mahalo) and attempts to wrangle the web 2.0 crowds into their wise form (Delver).

The common wisdom on ubiquity is that consumers want everything, everywhere...a raw ubiquity of power. While this is probably born out of championing consumer choice, the usefulness rapidly diminishes once the everything part passes a certain scale or the everywhere part succumbs to bloat. For instance, in a world where 600 minutes of video is uploaded to You Tube every 60 seconds, I don't actually want everything (emerging term: choice fatigue). Similarly, the Playstation 3 is part of so many everywheres that it ends up nowhere. Nextflix by contrast thrives by offering a sensible ways to limit choices and relax the pressure of real-time decision making (just add it to the queue and forget about it until it arrives at your door). The Wii doesn't play Blu-ray DVDs or store video or do calculus, which makes it easier to turn it on when I want to play a game.

On the other hand, I do wish I could add to my Netflix queue from my mobile phone (perhaps via text message) and that I could buy Wii store games from my laptop. Similarly, ffwd's vision is that applications on different platforms should communicate information to each other but should focus on functions that conform to the highest and best use(s). This sort of integration implies a limited feature set in a given platform, but increased usefulness across all relevant devices. Additionally, we lack presumption about what the highest and best use for a given user is on a platform, but rather than pack all functions in to "cover bases", we suggest making client applications configurable. This is a ubiquity of presence, the optimal experience is threaded through all the platforms that do their part in completing a task.

Yesterday at the Television of Tomorrow show, I demoed for the first time how ffwd enables asynchronous "two screen" applications. It's unremarkable in a way: use your laptop to find web clips that you think you will like and queue them for your TV, then switch to a box that connects the TV to the Internet (our choice is the Wii) where with one click you can start a streaming sequence of those selections and one-button skip through the ones that turn out to have been bad choices. What is significant about our implemented is actually (and I realized this only as I was demoing it) what you can't do on the TV client: you can't search, you can't browse user profiles, you can't share videos. In theory the user could configure the client to do those things, but we chose not to because those functions are more easily performed on the laptop. This is both an uncommon technology and an uncommon way of thinking about technology.

There are many examples of how pragmatically difficult it is to simultaneously hold both these ubiquities. Microsoft may have an identity crisis because of it. Advertising creative types are coming to grips with it. The kids, well, they prefer the ubiquity of presence, and that's really the prospect that matters. Interestingly, there is one group that's been managing this transition for a while, and they are doing quite well at it: interactive TV programmers. The example of the moment is Lisa Hsia who keeps extending the presence of Project Runway and won an award today for the effort. After my presentation, I had the pleasure of meeting people who have 10 years of experience with interactive video applications and who learned the hard way that (among other things) a two screen (laptop/TV) application can be better than trying to stuff interactivity into the set-top box or TV on the laptop. It's not uncommon for pioneers in a new medium to presume that the old medium failed because of the people, rather than the intrinsic limits of the medium, and they then proceed to fumble through the same early confusions. Looking to avoid this mistake, I'll bring this lessons of interactive TV to bear on our API launch later this year.

This isn't going to be another post comparing the merit of the Wii to the AppleTV. But it is important to state for the record why a team of Mac fans chose Nintendo's hardware over Apple's. Consider it a wish list for Mr. Jobs:

• standards compliant browser - our biggest unmet need? support for Flash 9, but that's really Adobe's ball and we can rectify that when we spec our own hardware/software stack
• support for third party developers - Alan Quatermain is a genius angel for making it possible to build applications in anticipation of some unspoken future when Apple lets third party developers at their box or at least promises not to firmware "upgrade" them off. Nintendo actually customized the Opera browser to allow functions that are particular to the Wii experience (like the Wiimote) which is a great help for developers.
• The Wimote - if you haven't used it, you may not know what I mean, but I think the biggest interface advance last year was not the iPhone's touch screen, it's the Wiimote IR sensor. Did you know it can point at stuff and drag it around from like 10 feet away. Seriously, you've got to come over to our office and try it.
• number of devices connected to TVs - total Apple TV sales are measured in thousands, Wii sales are measured in millions (and Apple TV had a year head start).

Perhaps the biggest gap for Apple TV for our purposes is a cultural one: the overwhelming download mentality of the product design. iTunes and the iTunes Music Store were breakthroughs for the digital music transition: a) preserved the transaction business model b) downloads allow for easiest repeat usage. Problem is in video a) repeat views are the exception b) the business model is media based. Hence the initial linking of AppleTV to iTunes on a desktop, and the persistence iTunes download distribution even though Take 2 is freed from the desktop proxy is a square peg/round hole.

But it wasn't until we became a Wii developers that we realized the unique advantage of the device. Even if the Apple TV fills all the gaps above and forgoes the download mentality, it will still lack the Wii's spirit of approachability. The Wii is the most social hardware device I have ever used. Obviously, devices like the mobile phone are more pervasively revolutionary for social interaction so that's not what I mean. The Wii is social in the same way IRC was: it empowers/emboldens shy people to participate in social activities. It breaks down real barriers to interaction and assumptions of power (but that's a topic worthy of discussion all its own). Suffice an example: my 5 year old niece can legitimately beat her dad at Wii bowling, and he still finds enjoyment in the subtleties of the control set. The Wii's inherent accessibility means it is a platform to reach people who otherwise wouldn't care to participate/consume the still rarefied world of Internet TV.

This is all to say that we believe the potential disruptor here isn't (primarily) our (or any) application, it's the Wii itself. One thing worth noting: we are by far not the first to try Internet TV on the Wii. Sofa Tube gets credit for planting the idea initially in my head back in 2006. A year later, but perhaps more famously, Stumble Upon took a few weeks to make a Wii custom interface for Stumble Video. What we realized is in our few weeks of working on it is that if you play to the Wii's strengths your application becomes implicitly friendlier. If ffwd takes credit for anything, it is in setting the upper most bar for a video user experience on the Wii. And what we accomplished truly shocked us.

We think "The Wii is a social entertainment device" is an important realization to share, so for the first time we are actively encouraging the spread of a meme. We've got one 2000 Wii points card (that's approximately 2 classic games) for up to 5 bloggers who trackback this story from a blog with a page rank of at least 5 (as proofed at PRChecker). If we don't get enough over 5s we'll go to the 4s and then the 3s (yay! everyone can play). If this is an effective incentive we may go buy more cards to give a way. First come first served and keep in mind we'll eventually need your contact info to send you the card.

At ffwd we believe that  over the next six years or so, some really smart people are going to develop really smart methods for recommending video content and our goal is to provide a frame work for those methods to get sorted out according to the viewers they work for. In the meantime, we are building our own recommendation methods because we need them to test the framework, but we  already discussing integration strategies with some early pure-play recommendation companies and working with Mashery on a system for user initiated private info sharing.It's not obvious from the ffwd interface, so it is worth mentioning explicitly, as a video preference repository, ffwd wants users to be able to what they want with their data and where they want to. Therefore, at a very basic level, Michel can put away his worries that ffwd's success will aggravate the zero-sum game effect. Quite the contrary ffwd benefit from the adoption of portable user profiles as he describes it.

The user gets to experiment with which site has the algorithms and user base to provide good ratings in which situations, and the services get to compete on how good they do their jobs

See we take this notion a step further, namely a user shouldn't be forced to jump from site to site (UI to UI) in order to try out recommendation algorithms. Moreover, once they've found some they like they should be able to access them separately or in aggregate from a single interface. Most importantly they should be provided accurate info on how those methods are performing for them so they can guided amongst them wisely. Serving this set of needs is really where ffwd fits into the ecosystem. We plan to build a platform where a suite of general services are provided to recommendation companies so they can focus on building the best recommendation methods.