The MSN SoapBox team has a blog post entitled Soapbox Now in Public Beta which states

We just flipped the switch from an Invitation Only, to a Public Beta.

 

No need to request an invitation and sign in to watch videos on Soapbox anymore!

Cool. I guess it's now OK to start petitioning the developers of Bloglines and Google Reader to show embedded MSN Soapbox videos like in my those in my post Ads: Vista vs. Mac OS X.

I'm still not sure how I feel about MSN SoapBox. Besides the obvious branding questions, I question the wisdom of building a YouTube clone as opposed to building an experience more like MySpace Video which would leverage our existing brand and investments in offerings like MSN Windows Live Spaces. Whatever, I guess.

The site is still a rather snazzy use of Flash and there are a couple of things in the interface I think existing sites like Google Video and YouTube could learn from. Check it out at http://soapbox.msn.com.