Microsoft’s video sharing service, Soapbox, has become a public beta a couple of days ago, and I must admit I haven’t been very excited about it. As Mashable rightly concludes: it’s one year too late, so it would have to offer something really extraordinary to be a serious competitor to YouTube.

So, I’ve had to try it out, and here are my thoughts:

- it can be slow in Firefox (I’m using the latest stable build), and it can sometimes crash it/make it unresponsive. This has been confirmed in one of the comments in the Mashable article.
- it has a number of small bugs in Firefox. For example, watching the video in full screen creates a huge slider and places the video in an ugly black box on a blue background twice as wide as my screen resolution
- When it’s not acting weird in Firefox, some of it is pretty fast - faster than YouTube. For example, switching to full screen view is instantaneous. The playback seems to be faster, too, and the buffering works good.
- It supports tags, which is cool.
- The entire GUI is boxed to fit inside the height of a single page. Plus, the comments, tags, file details and sharing options are boxed inside a small frame under the video. This creates a number of problems. For example, only 4 and a half comments are visible in any given time. This is not good for a site that plans to have thousands of users and hundreds of comments for each video.

Overall, I agree with Mashable’s conclusion: meh. It’s not bad, but it has bugs, it doesn’t bring enough novelty, the GUI is cluttered. If any other company besides Microsoft released it, the entire service would be forgotten in two days. This way, it will create some mild buzz, and then probably go down in history as another “it would be great if there already weren’t 5 better services” kind of product.