In what appears to be the very first voting block at 10 links a day, we won

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.

http://www.elecplay.com/episode/view/season/18/episode/109/segment/2/start/155

http://helpmybusiness.com/2008/10/episode-25-of-help-my-business-sucks-with-andrew-lock-signage-that-sucks-1-in-itunes-how-to-sell-premium-products-pandora-for-video-ffwdcom-and-a-big-marketing-lesson-from-1and1com/

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.