What's at the very top of YouTube this week? As of right now, it's monkeys. Receiving as of this minute a total of 132,501 hits, it's a minute and forty-five seconds worth of monkeys looking into a camera lens. Now I like monkeys just as much as the next guy. I think it's a real hoot seeing them roam freely on the streets when I'm over in Southeast Asia, and they always make good comic relief in television movies. That's the first thing they teach you at movie director school—if your plot starts to sag, throw in a monkey. 

Microsoft has entered into the business of video sharing, competing with YouTube in providing a forum for people to post their short video clips. Now you can have yet one more site onto which you can post videos of your dog doing tricks, your baby blowing spit bubbles, or pirated clips of pop stars shaking their booties. Launched last week into public beta, the MSN Soapbox offering delivers the same concept as YouTube. Although you can upload video in most formats, it only works with Internet Explorer. A convenience for users though, is that you can watch and browse from the same screen.

Of course, it's fun and social to share pictures and home movies, and things like YouTube and now Soapbox can be addictive. I navigated away from both sites after just a few minutes and didn't return, but then again, I'm the guy who puts a single quarter in the slot machine in Vegas and then wanders off to look for the buffet. And in the world of online video sharing, there's no delicious buffet, only the endless putting in of quarters into the slot machines, and watching other people put in their quarters.

With Microsoft putting its hat into the video sharing ring, bloggers everywhere are talking about the relative benefits, and inevitably whining about how much power and money Microsoft has. The Mashable blog (http://mashable.com/2006/09/10/msn-soapbox-microsofts-youtube/) correctly postulates that Soapbox is a “me-too” product, and the general consensus seems to be that Soapbox offers only marginal benefits. Blogowogo (http://www.blogowogo.com/blog_article.php?aid=573963&t=8) says there's not much there you can't get from YouTube, and MoneyBlogs (http://www.themoneyblogs.com/techbuzz/my.blog/msn-soapbox-now-in-public-beta.html) observes that Soapbox simply lacks good content.

Indeed, Microsoft is a day late and a dollar short, and not bringing anything new to the video sharing buffet table, which is still all hot dogs and no shrimp.

But still, even though Google proclaims to “do no evil” and Apple proclaims to be cooler than everyone else, Microsoft does know how to create software that most people still use, and more importantly, they know how to make money. Bambi Francisco at Marketwatch (http://www.marketwatch.com/News/Story/Story.aspx?guid=%7BFC7C8729-B8A2-40E2-8331-0A4EDBC02A7C%7D&siteid=mktw&dist%20=) puts her finger right on the problem, citing the debate on how user-generated-content (UGC) sites are going to make money on content they can't control, not to mention, deal with the liabilities of the inevitable pirated content. Advertisers, who will presumably form the basis of the revenue model of these sites, are still wary.

Microsoft certainly has the resources and marketing power to transform video sharing into a whole new genre that has actual value, but we'll have to wait to see whether they have the vision.