We (ffwd) get asked this all the time. (In fact I, Patrick, have been asked it pretty consistently for the past 8 years and over 3 companies but that's a topic for my personal blog). The breadth of our vision guarantees that we will have many companies competing with our features, but with regard to our mission of organizing/distilling/programming for the viewer the entire video web we stand completely apart.

For instance, our "Share a Video" form competed with the original Mesmo.tv website and though they have realized it is not worth pursuing as a standalone business, we will continue refining the idea as one component in our system. Likewise, we at ffwd respect mefeedia's pioneering (I was still fighting with record labels when these guys got started) work in applying the "feedtracking" concept to video content. It's important to note the opportunity illustrated by the fact that mefeedia's activity increase coincides with a rapid expansion of episodic video content. We just don't think feedtracking, or recommendations, or playlisting, or etc. is enough by it self to stem the impending flood of video content over the web.

Really if anything we can only describe our competitor by mashing up multiple next generation video companies, but it may be easier to describe it with an analogy from a more mature media space, music...and I still need to use three companies. Imagine for a moment if you had the best parts of Pandora, iLike, and last.fm and it worked on every device you plug headphones into. Well, that's what we want to do for video.

That's the word from the first 10 days of our beta period. It was great to hear a user say on a call today "The discovery section is great. I'm a blogger, and it takes me so long to search for videos; just having one good clip played right after the other is big help", but it is even more interesting to note that what people do most when they come to ffwd is...watch videos! No browsing, searching, or stumbling. And even if they originally arrive because of a recommendation, they continue by watching the videos we program for them to watch after the original recommendation.

We do think that browsing is important, just not as much as ChoiceStream does. Similarly, we think users love getting recommendations, just not only from the editors of WeShow (our tests suggest that friend-to-friend recommendations have a higher hit rate, but don't obviate the need for editorial collections). But both of these just create more information for a viewer to sort through, that's why what we are focusing on is how do you compress all of that relevancy information into a experience that is so spot on that you would commit 2 hours to watching what we've discovered for you. (And yes, we will get it to work on your TV so you can enjoy those 2 hours from the comfort of your couch).

We posted a new site build tonight (beta 1.10a) which adds a cool new "video personality" character to your user profile page:

What's your video personality based on?  Well, we compare your favorite TV shows to all other users, and then with some mathemagical science, we assign you a cartoon personality, all in good fun of course.  Keep on the lookout for an embeddable site widget for this very soon, so that you can share yours with your friends on other sites.

Today is a very exciting day for the ffwd team. We are officially launching our private beta program. This of course means new features and enhancements more below), but most importantly it means there are going to be a bunch of new faces on the site. Please be nice to them!

Based on our users' requests, the private beta of the site includes these features:

1. the ability to send videos to anyone with an email address (try it out on the Share a Video form)

2. new sites you can grab videos from. You can grab the URL of a video from any of these sites and add it to your favorites or send it to a friend:

• Blip.tv
• College Humor
• Daily Motion
• iFilm
• ManiaTV
• MetaCafe
• MySpace
• Revver
• YouTube

3. A new third party developer API (under the hood). This is a critical piece of our open networks strategy, and we will be introducing the full API to developers at a later date. Until then, you can contact us directly at developer@ffwd.com to request a beta developer account.

The site is "fully functional" as of this release, but still a work in rogress, so please keep that feedback coming especially on:

• other content sources you'd like us to add
• what you'd like to see in an OpenSocial and Facebook application
• using ffwd with your television

Also starting today, we'll be selecting active users to preview features "in the labs" and participate in the product planning process.