Facebook announced an evolution in their multimedia offering on their blog. This expansion of sharing mirrors a direction that Yahoo! took with its recent acquisition of Xoopit and mirrors similar functionality already available in content sharing specialists such as flickr. It also shows the potential threat that lifestreaming aggregators like FriendFeed, Tumbr and Posterous provide to Facebook even as it climbs to global domination. 

As things are born into the world, so we have the demise of others, the wheel of life happens in social media as well as the real-world. Microsoft is terminating its Soapbox video service. It is good that they are providing users with a way of downloading their videos - this is something Microsoft deserves a lot of kudos for.

As for the demise of Soapbox, in reality I am not surprised; content that I have seeded on Soapbox in the past usually had only 1 per cent of the viewership that the same content would have had on YouTube. In addition it was hard to link through directly to a video and the focus on monetisation was too extreme with the vended ads ruining the user experience. 

Thinking aloud, but I wonder if other media companies like Yahoo! will re-examine the need for having their own video business in the light of Microsoft's termination of the Soapbox service.