If you’ve seen the TV commercials and the billboards (and maybe even the blog posts from your favorite local blogger), then you should know by now that Smart has finally launched their sorta Web 2.0 portal attempt called Sandbox. The slogan for this website is “Now everything’s in one box” and it tries to do just that. Sandbox aims to be a content download site, a social network site, a mobile blogging site, a marketplace (e.g. Digisoria), and what else have you.

I’m one of the hundreds of people that got included in Smart’s closed beta testing program starting early this year and I’ve had the chance to try out the social networking and mobile blogging aspects of it. Well, I must say that I’m not quite impressed with it at all. I usually have this gut feeling at whether an endeavor will succeed or not (like the time that I predicted that ümobile would not succeed) and Smart’s Sandbox somehow gives me the fail vibe.

The problem is, Smart is trying to cram too much into its Sandbox offering (everything in one box, right?). It’s like one big Frankenstein: bits and pieces of stuff mashed together into an incoherent whole. This aim to be a jack-of-all-trades is quite a big contrast to the recently announced Google Wave which also tries to be many things (e-mail, IM, wiki, chat, blog, forum, etc.). Despite being a limited developer release, Google Wave actually makes a lot of sense and seems to do all of the things it purports to be in a very slick manner. Sandbox on the other hand is a mess. (I guess it’s the halo-halo Filipino culture coming into play.)

Smart is aiming to have a mobile-based social network (and what they have right now is a retrofitted Mostyle engine). They hope to earn money from people using the Smart network to interact with other people on the Sandbox network. (Well, the content downloading is another revenue stream but I’m not interested in that at all.) This social networking includes mobile blogging, mobile status updates (à la Twitter or Plurk), and mobile messaging (of sorts). Well, I used to be able to upload pics to the Sandbox site straight from my cellphone, but that only puts the photo into a staging area and the photo is not published. Now, I can’t even upload photos at all (or I was not updated on how to do it). I’d be pretty sold with the Sandbox concept if I could update a small blog by just sending an MMS with a photo or a video attached (à la Tumblr) but I can’t even do that.

I laud Smart for betting big on the mobile web. I certainly see a growing market for mobile Internet services but Smart’s Sandbox is pretty far off the mark. They spent a ton of marketing money to promote Sandbox. I wished they spent that money instead in developing a homegrown solution; I can certainly see Filipino developers creating something better and more tailored to the Filipino psyche. What disappoints me is that these points for improvement have already been given to Smart as feedback during the beta testing period. Apparently, the upper management didn’t listen. What’s even more telling is the fact that Ka Edong, a Smart employee, did not mention Sandbox at all during his iBlog5 talk on mobile blogging despite Sandbox having a booth during the blogging summit. Update (June 16): Ka Edong emailed me to say that he deliberately avoided mentioning anything about Smart and their services in order to avoid revealing anything he is not supposed to say.

Shown below are some choice snippets from other blog posts about Sandbox. I’m actually quite surprised that I’m not alone in many of my observations about Sandbox.

• Ely: “Smart’s attempt at social networking—fail.”

• Juned: “So sure join Sandbox but make sure to blog and send them feedback so that Smart can improve on this. Otherwise there is a Tagalog for this and the word is sayang/what a waste.“

• Regnard: “I’ve already given some recommendations in improving the navigation, particularly in the mobile platform. I’ve gone as far as recommending the delay of the launch unless these issues were solved. The site went live with most of the issues still there.”

• Noemi: “As a blogger and mobile worker, Sandbox does not meet my expectations as a blogging platform […]. Ditch the current platform, hire our local Filipino programmers to develop a truly-Filipino Sandbox.”

• Ferdz: “A sandbox has many possibilities, but like a castle made of sand, if you’re not careful it could easily crumble.”

• Cedric: “I’m pretty sure several millions of pesos have been spent on advertising this site alone. But that money could have been well spent on producing a more unique website with a more unique service that doesn’t try to ape everything that’s already there.”

• Jayvee: “So really, the most exciting thing about Sandbox is that it is continuously being improved based on the feedback from the community.”

• Arbet: “It is imperative for Smart to present a social network that is different from the existing ones. Otherwise, people will say Sandbox is just another social network site. Some acerbic people would add the phrase ‘that failed.’”

• Marck: “"I like the idea of SandBox. I like the idea of mobile blogging […]. I like the idea of making blogging available to the people. Yet my problem with SandBox—for the while that I’ve been using it, anyway—is that it’s just too much of a jack-of-all-trades, and a master of none.”

I’ve been a Globe user since 1999 and while I won’t give up my Globe postpaid line, I certainly would entertain the idea of having a secondary Smart number just to be able to use Sandbox, were it the ultimate mobile blogging platform it should have been. For now, I’m adopting a wait-and-see attitude.