Soapbox Goes Live

It’s easy to harp on about Microsoft and its abundance of flaws, but sometimes they do things which are quite good. One of those spiffy deliveries is Soapbox. It’s not the prettiest of video sharing sites, nor is it saturated with the numbers YouTube is said to hold, but it does some things right, and others very right.

It’s not crack-open-the-champagne kind of news that Soapbox has been opened to the public. We’re assuming the event largely went unnoticed. But it means that the service, which was written off long ago as makeshift mediocrity from Microsoft, has been getting some regular fine tuning done to its backend throughout the last few months.

We would like to inform you that the negative word about Soapbox is still out there. Mashable headlined its own coverage of the “official debut” with an underwhelming “Meh", and Webware decided to play the neutral party, speaking both good and bad about the site. It doesn’t take much to understand the agitation with Soapbox either. You can only post videos uploaded to the service to a blog located on Microsoft’s Spaces servers. The guys in Redmond responsible for Soapbox haven’t taken the time to integrate Windows Live, a multi-purpose information (personal and business-related) access point, either. We’d like to know why they haven’t made the match yet as well.

But there’s something I personally like a lot about Soapbox that peeves the heck out of me when it comes to YouTube. Fine, that’s a ton of video on YouTube. Its vastness is one of the things that make it so wonderful. But what’s up with the buffer time? I could be enjoying music videos but instead I’m frequently hitting pause to allow enough of the video to load to watch it run fluidly. And I’m on a 20 mb/sec downstream thanks to Verizon’s FiOS access. The folk at YouTube even have Google backing them up. It’s hard to believe those data plantations they’ve got humming along 24/7, with redundancy up the wazoo, can’t get content out to my screen quickly enough. Soapbox seems to do just fine.

Now, I know you’re going to say. “Soapbox has but a tiny fraction of the traffic YouTube’s got.” Which is true. If Soapbox got hit with YouTube’s daily supply of visitors, it would sink very deep, very fast. But taken as it is, Soapbox brings me far steadier streams than YouTube. Of course, this hardly matters if what is streaming is pure garbage, but that’s all relative. YouTube wasn’t throwing out Grammy-winner clips in its infancy. Soapbox’s stockpile isn’t in the millions, but it’s growing – albeit not nearly as quickly as YouTube did back in ’06.

It’s hard to tell if Soapbox will reach heights where it will be worthy of serious mention. There are video sharing sites that put it to shame in terms of sheer options: embedding, social networking, etc. But it’s looking alright to me, and as long as the group behind the scenes introduces more Live features to the site with relative haste, it might end up one of those extra things you and I turn to rely on more and more for our entertainment and discovery. If you’re living much of your online existence on Live, you might be viewing Soapbox's offerings sooner and more frequently than you expect.