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Soapbox Update

A post on the Soapbox Team Blog has alerted users that a change is coming as the Soapbox site goes down for a couple of hours whilst they make some changes to both the front end and the back end of the service.

"We have taken all of your feedback into account and spent the last few months redesigning and upgrading, both the frontend and backend of the service."

So this means that whilst they are doing all this, none of the embedded videos or gadgets will work. In the meantime, what are they doing with UI? Well, basically, this:

The whole menu system has had a massive facelift, and now works in the same way you might expect a Windows application menu would work:

Browse Videos

 

Categories

Player

Profile

Playlists

The update also includes a new feature allowing you to create and share playlists. Each time you watch a video it is automatically added to your playlist which can be viewed from within the player:

Everything else about the service seems to be the same, just using the new colour scheme, with presumably some improved reliability with the backend being changed, we will find out more for that when the update goes live.

Given that MSN has been moving towards a more unified UI, it would make sense for MSN Video to reflect these new changes, so will we see any changes in this direction from video.msn.com?

SL

Comments

 

Khristopher said:

Sweet! It looks like it's gonna be pretty slick. I hope videos play smoothly after this update. Does this mean it will no longer be beta?

April 25, 2007 2:30 AM
 

tophtucker said:

You know, I thought the old Flash interface was all right. And I loved being able to browse and upload, browse and play videos, etc. But visually and otherwise, it was woefully inconsistent with the rest of MSN. But I have to say, this doesn't look all too good either. In terms of functionality it's fine, but it's... well, not too pretty. The player especially. But hey, that's just my opinion.

April 25, 2007 3:16 AM
 

quikboy said:

I kind of like this new design. Even though the old Soapbox UI was pretty good, I think this is a great improvement to the old design and is more consistent with the new MSN UI. The new upload page is pretty good. I'm not sure about the new player though. The play, back, and forward buttons could use a little more flash with it, and the video time is hard to see. Only thing good about it is the bigger video time selection bar. The tags really look bland on the page. And I still wish they didn't pre-rate every video to 2 stars before anyone has ever seen them. Otherwise than that, these new improvements rock. A little more better tweaking and it would be a great YouTube sucessor.

April 25, 2007 4:32 AM

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