Snackfeed, a video recommendation site that tries to aggregate the web’s hottest videos, has made impressive progress since its launch last fall. We were first introduced to the site at the DreamIt Ventures (a startup incubator similar to Y Combinator and TechStars) first funding day, and it held its private launch three weeks later. Since then the site has seen impressive growth, with a reported 150,000 unique visitors in November. Snackfeed is currently in private “b’alpha” but TechCrunch readers can grab one of 1000 invites by visiting this site and entering the code “snacktastic”.
The site presents videos in a basic feed that is populated with videos shared by your friends, your favorite shows (which you can sign up for during the registration process), and clips that are currently trending in blog posts, Twitter feeds, and other places across the web. Users can also follow eachother using a Twitter-like follow system.
Snackfeed’s Jason Laan says that while the company initially concentrated on an extensive recommendation engine that segmented viewers into personalized channels, it found that most people were primarily interested in watching the web’s most popular clips. The site now serves these first, and then tries to fill in “the gaps” with recommendations based on the user’s favorite blogs, recently watched Hulu and YouTube clips, and favorite topics. The site’s homepage also offers a listing of the web’s current most popular videos to non-members, and acts as a sort of Hype Machine for video. Laan says that the site’s rapid growth can be largely attributed to an aggressive marketing campaign on Twitter and other social sites.
There are a few other players in this space, including ffwd (covered here), which is focused on created a powerful recommendation algorithm that allows users to “channel surf” across the web.
