Microsoft has been playing catch-up in most of their undertakings. They seem to enjoy the strategy of waiting until someone else is successful and then trying to steal market share away from them. They’re trying to outsmart the iPod with the Zune, and now they’re trying outdo YouTube with a site they call Soapbox.
Online video has been the craze for the past year and will only get bigger over the next few years. YouTube has dominated the scene so far and become the hot spot for just about any pop culture clip.
Soapbox was mentioned in the media a couple weeks ago and I decided to apply for an invite into the beta test. I just received the invite, put the site to test and here’s what I think.
Trying to be unique, Microsoft has gone the AJAX route in attempting to make the site as dynamic as possible. They’ve made a huge mistake while doing so. Like most AJAX apps, the back button in your browser is useless. Unfortunately, my habitual notions resulted in me going back and forth through the login page and site even when dozens of pages deep into Soapbox. Quite annoying.
The structure of the site is based on categories, which you can browse through and easily view the videos. While you can add up to 5 tags when submitting a video, the search functionality of Soapbox is practically hidden in comparison to YouTube. As opposed to searching for whatever you wish, the layout of the site encourages you to browse around by most viewed, categories, etc… which is far from as interactive YT.
The community aspects of Soapbox are awkwardly built. Using a tabbed format, the comments, tags, details, and sharing are constrained to a framed area below the video. This lacks the encouraging nature of YouTube for contributing comments and content.
The video upload size is the same as YT at 100mb but the playback and loading speed is much quicker. Being in Beta the library of videos is obviously a microscopic sliver compared to YouTube, but do they have a chance to catch up to or surpass YT at some point?
In my opinion, not a chance in hell. All of the technical details aside, Soapbox is just a poor clone of YouTube. The site makes it awkward to find videos and the most important aspect of viral marketing, sharing the videos, seems to be an afterthought on Soapbox.
With YouTube just being acquired by Google it would have been a much more intelligent move for Microsoft to have made an attempt to buy them as opposed to trying to recreate them. The deal might not have been possible with the stigma associated with Microsoft, but the public attempt couldn’t have hurt them anymore than Soapbox will.
If you just scrolled down to the end of this article for a summation, I’ll give Microsoft Soapbox 1 YouTube out of 5.
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