Lately all of our favorite services seem to be crapping out on us.  We told you about the upcoming demise of MSN Soapbox, where we have a number of videos hosted.  Users have until August 31, 2009 to head to video.msn.com, log in, and download their videos before they are lost forever.  July 29th was the first day that a download link was available to even be able to get videos off the service, so today we somewhat reluctantly headed over to download our interviews.  Hey, it wasn’t so bad!

After logging in and going to “my profile”, we first hovered over a video to find the download link:

While we had to download each video individually (and rename it from the default hashed name), we were pleasantly surprised by the speed of the download:

Speeds will vary of course depending on your internet connection, but seeing as how sometimes it took 2-3 hours to get a video uploaded and ready for viewing on Soapbox, we were happy with the download speed.

So all of our video interviews are safely stashed.  To be honest we may wait a bit before we make them available again (after they go dark on Aug 31).  YouTube looks to be out as a replacement, as it has a 10 minute limit, and most of our interviews run a bit over that.  We’re also looking at whether we want to continue using our blog software, Community Server, so it may not be worth all the work to replace links just yet.  CS is a great product, but we think we’ve found something that fits our needs a little better.  We’ll know more in a few weeks, but we might as well make these changes all at once.  We’re glad to have the interviews safe and sound for now, though.

One other note: the service we use to power “Blogs We Like”, Newsgator Online, is also shutting down, ironically on the same day, August 31.  (Newsgator is doing fine, and their free RSS Readers, News Demon for Windows, and NetNewsWire for Mac, will continue to be available,just the free online service is closing).  We’re not quite sure what we’re going to do about that, either.  Funny but all these services seem to have the same advice: “go use Google”.  Bleh.

More soon, as we get it all figured out.  We’re not going anywhere, and we’re looking forward to bringing you lots of Windows Live news in the upcoming months, no matter what services we find ourselves using.