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Xbox Twitter-Facebook update in-depth impressions

• By Dave Rudden
• October 19, 2009 13:31 PM PST
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Dave got the Xbox 360's Twitter-Facebook-Last.fm updates early and has in-depth impressions of each of the new sections!

Hey all, Dave here. I woke up at 3AM on a school night, but for good reason! The Xbox Twitter-Facebook-Last.fm update has now started for a few select gaming media members. My Twitter feed is embedded below, but for those of you who prefer thoughts longer than 140 characters long, here are my thoughts on each of the new upcoming additions to Xbox Live.

Before I get to specific impressions, here's two Protips for both Twitter and Facebook, as well as some general information. Both are much more enjoyable if you play songs off your 360 or stream them from your 360-connected PC, and making use of a USB keyboard or Xbox 360 chatpad will make tweeting and Facebook commenting much easier. And while the placement of these new items might change, right now Twitter and Facebook are prominently displayed in the community section, where you currently also find the "Game with Fame" events. The Zune Marketplace is the first thing that pops up when you're on the Music and Video section, and Last.fm is the second item listed in the music section. You can find the news feed at the end of the Inside Xbox section.

Twitter:As a bit of an Twitter addict, I made the micro-update social networking service my first destination. In terms of presentation, Twitter trumped everything else, with a stylized version of the front page (see above) that appears when you boot it up. It also runs as soon as you boot it, unlike Facebook and Last.fm, which required small downloads. Your feed will update every minute or so with new tweets from your friends, but you can manually update it by pressing Y. All of the updates must be manually entered by the user--you won't have to deal with the Xbox dishing out Uncharted 2-style auto-tweets, thankfully. One major fault of the Xbox 360's Twitter is the inability to click on links, since the Xbox 360 doesn't have a web browser. While the 360 might not ever incorporate a browser, maybe Microsoft can do some work with Twitpic, flickr and Yfrog to make sure that the majority of images uploaded can be viewed on Xbox Live. Some smaller changes that would delight @daverudden would be to show the character count remaining instead of just stopping the tweet at 140 characters, as well as the ability to see the avatars of other Twitter friends who have linked their accounts to Xbox Live.

Facebook: I can see Facebook on Xbox 360 being a hit during the holidays. Instead of crowding the family around a PC, you can show you and your friends'latest photo albums on your HDTV! While the images don't look as nice as if you put them on a thumbdrive, they're passable, and the sheer depth of photo access can keep you entertained for hours. While you can also post updates, and comment on others' updates and photos, a large part of Facebook is off the table when you use the Xbox 360. Particularly, you can't access any videos (embedded or created via Facebook) use Facebook apps like Mafia Wars, or click on links. One feature that I can't really comment on right now is the ability to link your Facebook friends to Xbox Live, and vice-versa. It could be a cool way to grow both of your friends lists exponentially, but with such a small number of users taking advantage of it right now, it's hard to judge how well it'll work.

Last.fm: I planned ahead to make my Last.fm account replete with excellent music suggestions, as I made the service my streaming-at-work music solution for a few months instead of Pandora. As a result, I enjoyed using Last.fm on Xbox 360 quite a bit. Streaming a pretty stellar setlist that included Band of Horses, The Shins, and MGMT, I rarely skipped a tune as I attended to a few chores around my apartment. If you haven't used Last.fm before, you can still enter the names of artists you enjoy, and like Pandora, you'll get a playlist filled with both the artist you mentioned as well as similar sounding acts. I also decided to try out the video game music section. That's right--the Xbox 360 Last.fm area includes an entire section dedicated to finding songs with video game tags. It was kind of difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff here, as there are many near-unrecognizable songs that were either from obscure games or incorrectly tagged. A good rule of thumb for this section--if you see Japanese text, click on it. Doing so for me produced a good selection of composers including Zelda's Koji Kondo, Final Fantasy's Nobuo Uematsu, and Symphony of the Nights' Michiru Yamane. When the songs play, you have the option of pulling up an information window, or you can let a slideshow of user-uploaded pics play. While you can't play music outside of the program, Last.fm on the Xbox 360 could be pretty useful as background music and visuals during a party or while doing chores. Still, it's not quite as cool as Pandora, which has a more streamlined interface and the ability to pause tracks.

Zune & News: The jury's still out on the Zune Marketplace. Much like the rest of the world, none of us GamePro editors actually own a Zune to put the videos on, and while the ability to download your shows to the PC is welcome, the fact that just about every broadcast TV program is watchable online and plenty of older programs and movies can be streamed in HD through Netflix on the 360 made it seem like the Zune Marketplace wasn't much of an upgrade over the Video Marketplace. The News feeds were buried in the Xbox Dashboard for good reason. You can stream a few MSNBC news clips, as well as animated Dilbert and New Yorker comics. Yawn.

And now, my mostly 360-filled Twitter feed:

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