| Tuesday, October 10, 2006 |
| My thoughts on...MSN Soapbox Beta |
 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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Posted by Leon
@ 5:15 PM
Permalink | Audiolink
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