Twitmatic Lets You Channel Surf Videos From Twitter

Just because it is shared on Twitter doesn’t make it good. Nevertheless, ffwd, the video-surfing recommendation site that borrows from StumbleVideo, has launched Twitmatic, a video site that plays only videos being shared on Twitter. (The name TwitterTV was already taken).

The concept is very simple. You are presented with videos in an embedded player which you can watch, or skip to the next one. If you like a video, there is a “Tweet this video” button, which acts as an extra vote for the video since presumably ffwd is counting how many times a particular video is Tweeted to come up with its recommendations. The videos I saw on the site were pretty random, everything from the little boy David who just came back from dental surgery and a guy throwing his Wii controller through his TV screen to one where some guys are setting up a race track in their office. Interspersed in there were also really bad marketing videos for a Rodial Tummy Tuck machine (I’ll spare you the link), get-rich-quick schemes, and dry stock market analysis.

People share all sorts of junk on Twitter. I’m not sure it works as an effective filter for video. But it does help kill some time. Ffwd also has set up a special SXSW version of Twitmatic showcasing videos from the conference in Austin which begins today.

(See also, our previous coverage on ffwd).