ffwd Launches Facebook App to Facilitate Use of Web Video in a Social Network Strategy

Social TV/navigation company, ffwd (the company describes its goals as to "reinterpret the television channel from the perspective of crowd sourcing, personalization and the social graph" and to "make the ever-expanding video Web easier to navigate"), announced earlier this month the release of a Facebook application which it says will make it easier for "celebrities, companies, organizations and their fans" to make relevant video content discoverable through their social networks.

According to the company, the new application continually imports an existing Web video collection--regardless of where it resides--to a Facebook group or page. Once the app (which is currently offered as a free beta) is installed, page managers tell it where on the Web the desired video collection is located, and the app then automatically and continually pulls from the collection to create a live feed on a company or other organization's Facebook page. ffwd says that the app will initially only support videos hosted by YouTube and Brightcove, but that it will shortly support over 250 other video sources as well as general RSS feeds.

ffwd is positioning the new app as being particularly useful to brand managers looking for an easy way to package relevant programming into a "virtual TV channel" for their Facebook audience: the company says that one of its strengths is that it will allow them to offer "instant video" to that audience directly within the Facebook user experience (i.e. without requiring users 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," ffwd CEO, Patrick Koppula, said in a prepared statement. "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."

In other recent news from ffwd (note: the company is expected to make more news this week--check itvt.com for coverage):
--In March, at [itvt]'s TV of Tomorrow Show in San Francisco, the company launched a service called Twitmatic (www.twitmatic.com) that lets users watch a real-time stream of videos being shared on microblogging service, Twitter. "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," ffwd's Koppula said in a prepared statement. "Plus, it's just so much fun to watch the visual stream of collective consciousness take shape!" ffwd says it is working on various enhancements to the service, including support for filtering by user names, support for filtering by ffwd channels, keyword search, a comments stream and permalinks. It recently implemented support for Twitter trending terms, allowing users to click on a list of popular Twitter terms (e.g. "Star Trek") in order to view a stream of thematically related videos. According to ffwd, Twitmatic is built on the company's MyTV infrastructure, a beta platform which it says allows users to increase the stickiness of their blog, Web site or social-network profile by creating a channel based on it. The company claims that the MyTV widget enables users "in just a few minutes" to "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)." (Note: last year, ffwd also enabled posting of videos found on any Web site directly to Twitter, using a bookmarklet, as well as the ability to make posted videos available as passive recommendations in a Twitter-like stream on a user's ffwd channel page.)
--In January, the company announced the release of an API which it bills as enabling delivery of its service's "adaptive channel intelligence" to any Web-enabled video device, including "living-room and mobile hardware," and within that device's existing user experience (note: ffwd describes its service as providing users with "personalized adaptive channels" of videos from around the Web: each channel draws on "the editorial wisdom of the Internet audience," the viewer's "social graph" and behavioral targeting, in order to populate its catalog of content, the company says). According to the company, over-the-top-TV platform, boxee, plans to use the API to integrate ffwd functionality into forthcoming versions of its products. It says that its developer API tools will enable standards-based methods of interacting with its service, including making requests from the ffwd site, using a standard XML-based protocol; linking ffwd accounts directly into other applications, widgets and mash-ups; and getting live updates on what people are watching on ffwd. "Building upon our vision to be the connector, or glue, for the entertainment ecosystem, ffwd channels now have the potential to drive a truly ubiquitous experience that is accurate, relevant and consistent over social networks, living-room hardware and mobile devices," ffwd's Koppula said in a prepared statement. "We make it possible for individual developers to access programming functions, and even apply them at the level of a single viewer--something that used to require a staff of hundreds to do."