Last year’s New Xbox Experience update was a fundamental shift for Microsoft’s console. It not only brought in a brand new user interface and a bevy of new features to go along with it, but it laid the groundwork for a more modular platform that could more easily be evolved and extended. That has become evident over the past year with features simply appearing in the dashboard without having to do anything.

Recently Microsoft has released a preview version of the upcoming system update which brings with it a host of new social features. Since I happen to be in Canada, not all of these features are available to me, but I’ll go over the ones that are here.

Zune Marketplace: The old video marketplace has been replaced with the new Zune Marketplace. The interface to which has been spruced up a bit. It divides videos up into their own sections, making it much easier to actually find what you want. Currently, the content that’s in the Zune Marketplace is the same as what was in the old video marketplace. I am unable to test the on demand 1080p streaming, so I can’t comment on whether this works well or not. All I’m really left with is a better marketplace UI with very little to download from it.

Twitter: There has been a lot of fuss made about the Twitter client for the Xbox 360. After having used it, I can’t really see what all the fuss is about. The client is about as basic as you can get. You can Tweet, search, view trending topics, etc. What you can’t do is visit links in tweets, since the Xbox 360 doesn’t have a web browser. Without that, or the ability to track hash tags, view videos and images in line, the usefulness of the 360’s twitter client is almost nil for me. Maybe this will evolve over time, but as of right now, the twitter experience is pretty poor.

Facebook: Here’s another idea that looks good on paper but doesn’t quite work out in practice. Facebook on the Xbox 360 has only the most basic of facebook features. You can browse your friends’ photos and see their status updates, comment and like those updates, and that’s about it. You’re able to find facebook friends who have gamertags and vice versa, which is a nice way of building up a friends list. While it is nice to be able to view photos on a big screen, the rest of the experience is clunky and feels like something that’s trying to be shoehorned onto a platform that isn’t quite suited for it.

Last.fm: This is the feature that I was most looking forward to. I don’t have anything to say about it since being in Canada I don’t have access to it.

I’m sure that some folks will enjoy the new features, but overall they were a bit of a disappointment for me. Maybe with more time these features will get better, but as they stand now they’re just not that useful.

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About This Author: Filippo Dinolfo

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