Qbox: Social Network Music Revisited

JR — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 20:57:44 +0000

I wanted to revisit a new Web 2.0 tool we reviewed last week called Qbox. At the time, I was impressed with the idea — but disappointed with the fact that, after many attempts, I simply could not get the thing to install and function.

Following that report, the CEO of Qbox — Peter Keum — contacted me and informed me they’d discovered a Firefox compatibility issue that seemed to be the root of my problem. He referred me to a roundabout fix his team had posted on the Qbox blog following our story and assured me they were working on a more permanent solution.

“We do realize that we need to make the product more robust, and please be assured that we are working day and night to make it perfect. Your case seems to be a known issue we’re trying to resolve,” Keum told me.

The fix involves manually downloading two files into Firefox subdirectories, and — as he predicted — it did correct the problem.

With that behind me, Qbox proved itself to be a relatively neat little program. You can type in the name of any artist or song and it’ll pull up a list of social network sites where you can stream it along with various live versions and cover performances. One click later, and you’re listening to your tune.

My only complaint is the interface: The current Qbox configuration requires you to jump back and forth between a web site — where you search for and find the songs — and a separate player application, where you actually play them. This becomes a bit cumbersome; it would be far easier from an end-user standpoint if the functions were condensed to one place.

On the whole, though, I’ll stick with my original conclusion: This is a great concept. I’ve wasted tons of time trying to find specific artists or songs on various social network platforms. With some tweaking and refinement from this beta release to the final product, Qbox has the potential to put that kind of searching behind us and create a very convenient music streaming solution.

Qbox

Qbox: Great Idea, But Doesn’t Work

JR — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 19:05:36 +0000

Qbox is a new tool that lets you aggregate and play music from a variety of social networking sites like MySpace, Bebo, and YouTube. I was pretty pumped when I read a write-up about the idea over at Mashable, but then I quickly grew disappointed when I decided to try the thing out for myself.

First of all, Qbox requires you to download and install a program — strange, considering the concept is totally web-driven. Once you install the utility, though, things get even murkier. It took me some random clicking around to figure out that I was supposed to hit a random, unlabeled icon that basically just opened the Qbox web site in my browser. Again, no instructions, but I deduced that I was presumably now supposed to click through the site to find an option to create an account before it’d let me use the service.

At this point, I was getting a little annoyed, but I was still intrigued enough to keep going. The next problem, though, popped up after I created my account, when I tried to search for songs (also done through the web site — not through the program it made me install). I found plenty of results, but when I tried to click on the play button for any of them, the web site gave me a pop-up window saying the Qplayer utility — the same utility from which I had clicked over to the site in the first place — hadn’t yet been installed.

I still wasn’t quite ready to give up, so after a few unsuccessful attempts at getting around this, I decided to humor it and click “OK” — hoping a redownload would finally convince this service I had the program and was ready to proceed. But alas, still no success. I was unable to ever get it to even recognize that I had downloaded and installed the damned thing.

Oh yeah, and clicking on the “User Guide” just played a long and tedious video with no useful information. The “Help” section consisted of a FAQ that didn’t address anything related to my issues.

I did a little digging and discovered I wasn’t the first one to have problems with Qbox. Blogger Matt Rosoff of Webware wrote about troubles of his own when he tried it out several days ago.

Don’t get me wrong — the Qbox concept is great. It’d be a treat to be able to track down and play music from various social network services in one central place, without having to deal with all the annoying internal menus and search processes of each individual site. Unfortunately, though, it appears that Qbox has a ways to go before it becomes a practical, functioning solution. Let’s hope for its sake that someone else doesn’t take the same idea and do it well in the meantime, or Qbox may never amount to more than a short-lived blip on the Web 2.0 radar.

The Inquisitr » qbox

Qbox: Social Network Music Revisited

Qbox: Great Idea, But Doesn’t Work