Ironically one day after Google's acquisition of YouTube, MSN Soapbox decides to issue another round of beta invites. Here are some of my thoughts and findings on MSN Soapbox:
- I like their interface for browsing videos (see above). I like the fact that I can watch a video while browsing other videos which cuts down the amount of time I have to spend jumping from one video to another.
- The space occupied by the video player means there is less space for recommendation of other videos I might be interested in. That being said, the recommendations can be found on the "details" tab of the player but the lack of information for the videos made it somewhat useless. In the end, I found this a little annoying as I was randomly clicking videos and constrained to browse by their predefined methods (most recent, most viewed etc.).
- Their site has a nice use of AJAX though inconsistently. I get the intrusive error pop ups reminiscent of a 7 year old programmer (they are getting younger these days) for invalid input in certain textboxes. Come on, it's not that hard!
- MSN Soapbox streams your videos instead of the progressive download found on YouTube. It means your video starts up faster (not by a tad lot mind you) and you can jump to any point in the video with only a slight delay, which comes in handy for the longer videos.
- I like how I can have a video file uploading in the background while browsing and watching other videos.
- Processing for the video was abysmally slow. It took 30 minutes to process my 4.5 minute video! Podcast Spot could have converted the video to 6 different video formats and 4 different audio formats during that time!
- I'm not sure how their tag cloud works or it may be buggy. I tagged my video "half-life", "malevolence", and "tfc" yet each tag was progressively larger than the previous despite my video being the only tag for the latter two. The "half-life" tag has two videos with that tag. They also rearranged my tags to be in alphabetical order.
- There seems to be 20-30 new videos added every hour.
- There are already a lot of sexually suggestive videos on MSN Soapbox.
- Videos are limted to 100 mb in size.
- They need to limit the length of a tag. One tag was 22 chinese characters long!
In my opinion, MSN Soapbox is already miles better than Google Video but despite that, it still won't be enough to dethrown YouTube (or I suppose now Google). It's a good start but that's all it is - a start.
Video: Malevolence
(probably won't be able to see the embedded player until Soapbox is out of beta)
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