Inside SoapBox Beta

Do you believe in fate? I don't, though I have just been invited to join Soabbox beta, and only two days after Google announced they bought Youtube. Causality? I don't know, might be.

At first sight, the service looks much more clean than YouTube does. It takes advance of all the Web 2.0 possibilities with a much more dynamic site than Youtube's.
It works perfectly with no bugs in Firefox (using Firefox 2.0Beta 2 here), the photos are from Firefox too.


(Click to enlarge)

You don't have to wait when you click a link (even faster than Gmail), and it has cool menu animations with a slight Vista look. It doesn't even change of page when you make a search, so I can say it's so fast to navigate thru menus (you sometimes forget you are actually looking at a webpage).

The videos also load a lot faster than they do in YouTube, you can watch them in real time, and rewinding works!. The video quality is similar to YouTube's, nothing to add here. The only bug I found is the timing, either the video duration, or the left time count doesn't work well, I don't know.
A great feature is the full-screen button. In YouTube it opens a pop-up that starts loading the video again, in SoapBoax, it just edits the video size (without changing the page, again) and without loading again, of course.

The quantity of videos there is the negative point. Perhaps because it's still Beta, but there aren't so much videos, 2958 at this very moment. The quality of them, well, only saw a couple of them, but there are interesting things, it all depends on what is uploaded, it depends on the users, we'll see when it's released as final product (still no date).

Uploading. In YouTube you have to create an account, since in SoapBoax I already have one (at least in the Beta you must have) I don't know if it'll be necessary in the future. It allows up to 100MB, and as it says "Soapbox does not accept any Copyrighted or Obscene material."
The accepted file types are: AVI, ASF, WMV, MOV, MPEG 1/2/4, 3GPP and DV.

The uploading form:

(Click to enlarge)

So this is it, if you have any questions, or anything you'd like to know and I forgot to add, leave a comment, but before you do, I make it clear: I can't give invitations out (there isn't such a tool, it's not that I don't want to), the only way to enter the Beta is by requesting it in the site. I can only say good luck.

Have a nice day.