Beyond Binary

SAN FRANCISCO--In the coming months, Microsoft plans to significantly scale back Soapbox, the video site it once hoped might take on YouTube in the user-generated content arena.

In an interview on Tuesday, Microsoft Vice President Erik Jorgensen said Soapbox is one of the areas that Microsoft is pulling back on in the wake of a tough economic environment. His unit also recently pulled the plug on Microsoft Money, the company's personal finance software product.

Soapbox launched in 2006--the same year Google announced its deal to buy YouTube--but never emerged as a significant threat to the market leader. (See video, left, for a review from Soapbox's early days.)

In 2007, Microsoft stopped allowing new users to access the site while it added filtering technology aimed at reducing the amount of copyright content posted on its site. It returned a few months later, but has been largely an afterthought in the video market, except as a home for Microsoft's own videos.

Microsoft hopes to transform Soapbox, originally code-named Warhol, from an also-ran in the user-generated content space into a forum where bloggers and citizen journalists can post videos relevant to areas in which MSN focuses, categories like entertainment, lifestyle, and finance.

Jorgensen

"We definitely look at it and say we want Soapbox to stand for something and add to our overall video strategy," he said, noting that being a broad user-generated video player was too expensive in light of the current economy.

While Microsoft will focus on such content, it's still unclear whether it will continue to allow users to freely upload their videos or if it will require some sort of editorial selection of the movies before they make it onto the site.

"We haven't decided whether you just continue to support it or whether it is too expensive and out of our focus to do," he said.

Mark Cuban, speaking Wednesday at the D: All Things Digital event in Carlsbad, Calif.

(Credit: Ina Fried/CNET)

CARLSBAD, Calif.--Mark Cuban says that despite the growth of YouTube, the Internet video market over the last decade has actually been a disappointment.

The problem, he said, is that when Google bought YouTube it focused on ubiquity rather than making money. The result, he said, is that the market can't really sustain itself.

"This is a company that is literally subsidizing the bandwidth for the world," Cuban said, speaking at the D: All Things Digital event. That's a risk, Cuban said, if someone were to ever find a better search business model than Google.

"I think its a real disappointment to see where Internet video has come," Cuban said, noting that the industry still doesn't have advertising standards, among other shortcomings.

Asked why that doesn't sound like a business opportunity, Cuban said, "It's like fighting Microsoft" in the PC business.

"YouTube has gotten so big you are not a standard unless YouTube adopts you."

He gave some credit to Hulu for trying to build a money-making Internet video site.

"Hulu has done some great things and they are focused on monetization," he said, but also added "they have some big pockets that they have to appease."

As he has in the past, Cuban criticized the Internet saying it was "dead," "staid," and generally uninteresting. He likened it to the PC software business after the WordPerfect-Word and other battles had ended.

"It's just a utility," he said.

As for the Twitter guys, he said he is not worried they don't have a business model.

"They can make money," Cuban said. "They are having just as much fun teasing everyone."

Users of Microsoft's instant-messaging service found themselves unable to share links to YouTube videos on Friday evening and Saturday morning, sparking brief worries of a possible Microsoft-led effort to block access to the Google-owned video-sharing site.

Microsoft said in a blog posting Sunday that the issue was a mistake made by the third party that handles blocking of potentially unsafe content for MSN Messenger and Windows Live Messenger.

"As some of you noticed, we had a problem from Friday night to Saturday morning where our Messenger service was incorrectly blocking some legitimate IP addresses," a Microsoft employee said on the company's Messenger blog. "We sincerely apologize for any difficulties this caused our users."

The company thanked users to alerting it to the problem. "Because of your help, the incorrect block was only in place for a few hours."

Microsoft also tried to throw cold water on some of the "outlandish speculation" on the cause of the problem.

"Microsoft did not request to block any of the URLs that were accidentally blocked," it said in the blog. "The blocks were made by our partner as a result of their process to block harmful URLs. We are still investigating the specific reason our partner made these incorrect blocks and we will work with them to improve their process for detecting harmful URLs while not blocking safe ones."