San Francisco-based startup ffwd (pronounced fast forward) is starting to accept applications from the potential beta users. I’ve been just submitted mine. According to the announcement of ffwd, its beta program will begin on November 30 this year with 2,500 users initially and last for at least six months. The announcement was made at the NewTeeVee Live. For those who receive the beta invites will be offered a full-access to the services that ffwd rendered. Currently, beta users can access to ffwd million of channels, tracking favorite video clips of friends across multiple social networking sites, and pushing recommendations to their TV or mobile devices. As stated on ffwd’s landing page, it is a new site that helped a new user to discover videos from all over the Web and ffwd bills this new initiative as the future of video watching site. The combination of features has substantial roots in established consumer behavioral science such as social recommendation, the joy of discovery, which video came first, what video tastes of a user and whether her like-mind friends’ video tastes are the same or not. ffwd provides a taste monitoring that can monitor one’s video tastes and help a user to discover the videos that suited her tastes. Though the combination of ffwd’s features could bring the compelling experience to its users, but the recommendation approach might raised some concerns for privacy advocates. However, ffwd said in one of its blog entry that they believe they’ve built the best place to explore and watch videos on the Web and ffwd provides a platform that solved the video viewing problems of the future.

The CEO of ffwd Patrick Koppula is the former co-founder and COO of iLike & GarageBand.com. ffwd was founded by veterans from iLike & CNET Entertainment and its team also includes veterans from Eveo and Rock You. In addition, ffwd has raised a $1.7M in a Series A funding from venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson in August 2007.