My thoughts on…MSN Soapbox Beta

October 10th 2006 -

This morning, I checked my Hotmail account. Usual routine. Nothing special. And in the midst of all those social networking invites and work at home scams, I found an invite to MSN Soapbox, sitting pretty in my inbox. I checked it out about two weeks ago, but the invites were all out. So I groveled at the bouncer’s feet by requesting an invite. And I got one. Yay! I feel like one of the cool kids! You can degrade yourself too by begging for yours here. The retarded half-man, half-butterfly didn’t impress me much, but I figured it was only a demo anyway. I totally forgot about it. Anyways, I accessed it.

What do I think? Meh, not bad. Not great either. Nothing revolutionary here. Basically YouTube with a prettier design. But if YouTube was as rich as Microsoft, it could afford one too. It has a nice interface, I must admit. Not many videos up. Understandable. After all it is in beta. A lot of them are Chinese. Or is it Japanese? Never could tell them apart. The picture quality is great, but they’ve got mainly commercials and trailers, unlike YouTube, which has tons of clips with people seeking their little 15 minutes of fame.

And Microsoft simply couldn’t resist plugging itself, with just about every category featuring videos of the Tech Fuhrer himself, one of his minions or one of his products. And you know they had to insult the Mac. Most videos tagged “Mac” or “Apple” were parodies of Mac ads or Mac products. The rest were neutral. None about Mac superiority. And all the vidoes tagged “Microsoft” were basically PR for Microsoft. Can you say censorship? All in all, this is just another case of Microsoft playing catch up after losing market share because of its own complacency. Another YouTube clone, with all the totalitarian goodness of Microsoft.

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7 Responses on “My thoughts on…MSN Soapbox Beta”

Anonymous Says:
October 10th, 2006 at 8:25 pm
You do know that Google has bought YouTube?
So much for being the little site that could.
So much for a maverick existence!
taylor Says:
October 10th, 2006 at 9:49 pm
nothing but a frail attempt from bill and the boys to bite a piece of the video communty market share frail attempt because as mr anonymous said google just gobbled on youtube for 1.65 billion and they already owned google video so its a win win for google and youtube they plan to keep the youtube name and just keep the adds as is difference being they are now the 100% collector on the adds unlike before.. youtube traffic is crazy stuff i feel its near to myspace which google pays 90 million to advertise on. sigh. the wonders of web development and web real estate when will animesynergy ever get there..
Mad Bull Says:
October 10th, 2006 at 11:48 pm
So do you think they will catch youtube up eventually? I mean, it is Microsost. You can’t just count them out! Maybe Longhorn will be tied to Soapbox somehow, you know?
Melody Says:
October 11th, 2006 at 11:31 am
Technology, technology, technology — Leon, yu coulda start a tech class pon yu blog, yu know, as a likkle roast.
aarond Says:
October 11th, 2006 at 2:33 pm
Hahaha MSN, will never catch youtube re the videos for one main reason. Very few people trust MSN and since more than half the videos out there are violating copyright there is no way people will put it on an MSN run network
db20 Says:
October 14th, 2006 at 6:24 pm
And do you thing people trust Google any more than MSN? Copyright lawsuits are coming to YouTube and they will start looking like all the big company video services.
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