Developing new technology is the same type of endeavor as composing and recording a song or writing, filming, and editing a movie, and therefore Richard Cave's "nobody knows" problem ultimately applies to the business desire for reproducibility (Creative Industries http://www.amazon.com/Creative-Industries-Contracts-between-Commerce/dp/0674008081). While we may be able to describe in general and specific terms, after the fact, why a particular song, movie, or technology became popular, the description by nature cannot provide a basis for describing the next popular creation (it can however provide a basis for formulaic efforts like sequels and spin-offs).

A good song, says what needs to be said, says it within the context what has been said before , and says it at the right time. Consider that the themes of songs we love (or hate) really don't differ much from the songs we care nothing about (neutrality is worse than hatred for the creative). It is the timeliness, relevance, and craft of the expression of that theme that wins the day. And if a song further exhibits time*less*ness, ongoing resonance, and beauty it becomes a "classic".

This analogy neatly explains many phenomenon in popular technology: hits-based business structures, a belief in king/queen pickers, fadishness, increasing operational focus on marketing and promotion, etc. The business of new popular technology looks like the business of music and movies, because the creation of new popular technology looks like the creation of music and movies.

A few things follow from this analogy. Winning technologies like YouTube are not thematically novel (i.e. hundreds of competitors in the online video distribution space, which is ultimately thematically related to television), but rather emerge as the most timely, relevant, and well-crafted. Further, we cannot ignore the influence of resources - monetary,  power, or otherwise - on the relevancy component of the function. Perhaps most importantly, it is way too early to know whether any of these recent technologies have graduated to "classic" status yet. Even Google, while of obvious business value, has yet to exhibit the cultural longevity of Abbey Road, or Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, or perhaps more to the point television or the telephone. The last two illustrate the final business problem for popular technology ...successes become categorical and thus commodity.

Finally, the answer to your question as it applies to your business, Fred, is the same as in other creative businesses: prolificacy, experimentation and inspiration comprise the measure of creative capacity. The business problem is that the creative process is orthogonal to the ex post facto hallmarks of creative success (even if you substitute or add your own to timeliness, relevance, and craft). Everybody knows why a creative *product* was a success, but we can only perceive the capacity of a creative *effort* to output a large number of products all of which try to be subtly novel and "come from the heart", one of which *might* be a hit.

Gotta love it, right?!

- Real-time video search
Instead of "all videos shared on Twitter" or just filters for Twitter Trends, you can now perform your own search (results sorted by recency) and save those searches to track in real time.

- Integration of "Log in with Twitter"
By logging in with your Twitter account, you can save your searches, mark videos as favorites, and follow people who share interesting videos. In our testing experience, this has been a very helpful tool
to discover new people on Twitter.

- Toggle between video and tweet view
You can now see a Twitter-like list view of the 20 most recent results that match your search (If only so you can easily see how distinctive our results are from other video search engines you currently use)

So what's the answer to "What are you watching?" Twitmatic.com, of course. If like the direction we are headed with this (even if the implementation is still rough around the edges), please tweet "What am I watching? Twitmatic.com, of course"

Santa Monica, CA – May 7, 2009 – From the Digital Hollywood conference, ffwd (pronounced “fast forward”), the company making the ever-expanding video web easier to navigate, today released an application for celebrities, companies, organizations and their fans to make relevant video content discoverable through their social networks. Built on the Facebook Platform, ffwd’s new application continually imports an existing web video collection, no matter where it resides, to a Facebook Group or Page. The announcement reinforces ffwd’s support of the vision that web video must move toward a form of audience-driven social television.

To install a free beta version of the application, go to http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=75733927201. After installation, page managers tell the application where on the web the existing video collection resides and it will automatically and continually pull from that collection to create a live feed on your Facebook page. Initially, ffwd will support videos hosted at YouTube and Brightcove, but will soon support over 250 other video sources and general RSS feeds.

For brand and group managers looking to easily package relevant programming into a virtual TV channel based on what is meaningful to their Facebook audience, ffwd now helps them incorporate that interactive content messaging directly into the user experience, which means instant video for their followers without ever having to leave Facebook.

“Facebook Pages are one of the best ways for real people to express the relevance of a brand in their lives, and ffwd now makes it easy to enrich that relationship with video,” said Patrick Koppula, CEO of ffwd. “Based on conversations with existing partners, I firmly believe that ffwd is creating a disruptive opportunity for brands on Facebook. Anyone who cares about establishing a broadband social media presence should incorporate web video into their Facebook Pages and ffwd makes it easy to do that right now.

To understand is really going on you just need to remember that Google didn't purchase Youtube to get into the video hosting/streaming business (I mean who wants to be in that business long term anyway), they purchased it as a stronghold in the video information business: what do people watch, what do they bookmark, and now, what do they tweet.

It's not that Google couldn't previously collect info on what videos were being Tweeted but it was limited to when it happens to crawl the exploding number of Twitter pages when a YouTube URL happens to be among the recent tweets (very hard to keep up), or when a link is clicked on in a tweet which often goes through intermediaries like TinyURL and masks the original tweeter. Google has now determined that this information is now important enough that they want to collect it at the moment it was created and cutting third parties out of the info entirely. In sum, Google now recognizes Twitter as a repository of real-time information and at least with regard to video, wants to take some of that mojo back.

Now, I may be biased because we at ffwd saw this opportunity nearly a month ago and launched Twitmatic, the real-time video stream of Twitter community. If you too recognize the value that Google is going after, you don't need to wait for Google to figure it out. If you want to see all the videos being tweeted from YouTube (or one of 250 other video sites) you can do that immediately at http://www.twitmatic.com. Since then we've added support for filtering the stream on Twitter Trends, and now that we've been given proper access to the API (thanks Twitter!) we can start implementing the more advanced features users want:

• watch only the videos posted by your followers or people who follow you
• discover new people to follow based on the videos they tweet
• a twitter based comment/reply stream for videos
• track videos that correspond to your areas of interest

And please join the Twitmatic community @Twitmatic on Twitter to direct our efforts so in essence, Twitmatic will be your personalizable real-time video community and startpage.

This first release includes the following features:

- Sign up or log in to your account on ffwd using your Facebook account.

- Import your favorite shows and interests from Facebook directly into your ffwd channel.

- View or search for your Facebook friends on ffwd using their Facebook identities.

- Post videos directly to your Facebook profile page when sharing or saving a video on ffwd.

We'll continue to work on improving the Facebook user experience on our site in the coming months, so please let us know what else you'd like to see!

San Francisco, CA – March 11, 2009 – At InteractiveTV Today’s TV of Tomorrow Show, ffwd (pronounced “fast forward”) today launched Twitmatic, a destination powered by ffwd.com that lets users watch a real-time stream of videos being shared on Twitter. Now, the company that introduced hundreds of thousands of consumers to the idea of a personal remote control for web video is bringing its channel concept to millions of Twitterers – go to www.twitmatic.com and check it out.

“Twitter, as the dedicated real-time communications platform, is the best place and audience to demonstrate how ffwd enables an instantaneous community-driven television channel,” said Patrick Koppula, CEO of ffwd. “Plus, it’s just so much fun to watch the visual stream of collective consciousness take shape!”

ffwd has already received an incredible amount of user feedback on its Twitmatic release and looks forward to making further enhancements including:
•    support for Twitter trending terms;
•    support for filtering by usernames/people you follow;
•    support for filtering by ffwd channels;
•    search by keyword;
•    a comments stream; and
•    permalinks

Twitmatic is built on ffwd’s MyTV infrastructure, a beta platform to increase the stickiness of your blog, website or social profile by creating a channel based on it. In just a few minutes, the MyTV Widget lets you now build an embeddable "TV station" that plays an engaging sequence of hundreds of videos based on your site topics (or any topics you choose for that matter). To get started making one specific to your own community, visit the MyTV creation tool at http://www.ffwd.com/widget/create. The ability to integrate the player with your look and feel is coming soon.

Bonus:  For those who are unable to make it to SxSW, don’t just read what’s going on, watch it in real-time starting Friday, March 13th at http://www.twitmatic.com/sxsw. To know when the stream has started, follow @twitmatic on Twitter or subscribe to blog.ffwd.com. If you are posting video from SxSW to Twitter, be sure to include SxSW in the tweet so this channel can pick it up.

Of note this week...Hours of veronica Mars being watched and a user channel (celainn) breaks into the top 5.

One fascinating thing to note about this week is the number one result was a "miss" in the traditional sense. The searcher was led to an acoustic rendition of the theme from MacGyver (not Def Comedy Jam) and still stayed for 2 hours.

PK

The first one deserves special recognition because we recently tweaked our channel AI and this might be a result. The other four were the were the more typical 1 hour plus, The person who came in looking for Homicide Life on the Street stayed for 5 hours, as much time as many people spend watching television.

(btw, sorry I missed a few weeks, I'll go back a fill in the gaps soon)