TwitBook 360 – Gaming goes social
Microsoft’s first foray into ‘social networking’ on the Xbox 360 came with the integration of Live Messenger back in May 2007 as part of the then ‘spring update’. Fast forward to 2009 and, whilst Messenger is still popular, people are more likely to be found messaging through Twitter and Facebook so it hardly comes as a surprise that Microsoft have chose to add these to the Xbox. Forming part of a new “Community Channel” not available until later in the year I managed to get myself on to the ‘Xbox Live Update Preview’ to see what all the fuss is about.
Facebook on Xbox 360
FACEBOOK – To be perfectly honest I can’t really see why I will ever have the need to visit my Facebook account on the Xbox. For obvious reasons it is a somewhat abridged copy of its web-based parent, but it has been ported across remarkably well. Sure you can update your status, see friends profiles, view yours and friends’ photos in nice little slideshows and check out the newsfeeds but frankly why would you want to when you have a perfectly good computer in the house!? When you look past the great work done to bring the service to the console you really need to ask yourself why they bothered. After the initial 10 minutes of ‘oh that’s cool’ you quickly realise that it’s far quicker and easier to fire up you laptop or desktop, log in, and do on Facebook whatever it is you need to do before returning to your console. No doubt there will be plenty of people who will while away the time on Facebook whilst waiting for friends to come online for some button mashing but the question still stands, why not do that on a computer?
Twitter on Xbox 360
TWITTER – Now Twitter on the other hand I use, often. Admittedly I have it on my computer through TweetDeck and my phone with Tweetie but its integration into the Xbox really caught my attention. Imagine, you’re in-game, you’ve just done something to be truly smug about, you have finally conquered that epic level or fragged a mate beyond recognition and you really want to brag about it. You pause your game, fire up the guide button, navigate down the menu items and…. FAIL! Twitter hasn’t been so cleverly integrated as you’d have understandably expected it to be, opening up the guide mid-game and firing off a quick tweet is nothing short of to be expected but alas is not possible.
You see, like Facebook, it is a standalone application accessed from the dashboard, completely segregated from everything else. If you want to access Twitter (or Facebook) you have to launch the app from the dash and log in. If you are already in a game you have to quit to the dash first, if you decide to launch a game after tweeting you have to exit Twitter, logging you out in the process. Now, it makes perfect sense to have the standalone app available on the dashboard to read through tweets, check out trends and view profiles but why not include the basic function of tweeting from the guide?!? It really is a shame as Twitter on the Xbox is otherwise a great app, and something I imagine I’d use a lot. And the most annoying thing of all? Fundamentally it would be no different than opening the guide mid-game and sending a message to a friend through either the message centre or Live Messenger! Hopefully this is something that Microsoft will look to further integrate before it’s launch to the greater populace because at the moment it is a fatal flaw. Twitter by its very nature is supposed to be spontaneous, the ability to share what you are doing or thinking in that exact moment, not minutes later once you have quit your game, launched and logged in to the app and then tweeted.
I fully intend to further explore the functions and limitations of both Facebook and Twitter on the Xbox 360 but at this point neither seem more than a flash in the pan. Facebook is nice but rather pointless, whereas Twitter has the potentially to be fantastic and useful but is seriously limited with the omission of something so simple.
Oh yeah and another word of advice, don’t even bother with either unless you either: a) own a chatpad, b) have a spare keyboard plugged in to a USB slot, or c) have very little to say, typing 140 characters using the onscreen keyboard would be nothing short of painful!
