Facebook, Twitter, Last.fm Impressions
By Alexander 9 Comments
A quite useless addition. One key reason being that you can't follow links of any kind - no surprise there, the 360 doesn't have browser support, but I hadn't fully realised how crippling that could be until I opened my account on my 360. Almost everyone I follow links to one thing or another, the exception being where one wants to tell me how good the sandwich they just had was and even then if they want to show me a photo of how well they stacked it - they can't. the other main point is that Twitter, for most users I would suspect and certainly for myself, is not something you do exclusively. By that I mean you Tweet and read Tweets while doing something else, whether that be browsing Giant Bomb or on your commute to work. When you use Twitter on the 360, Twitter is all you can do.
It's nice going through photos on the large screen. It's a shame the resolution is so low. Other than this Facebook on the 360 fails because it doesn't have a wall. It's been stripped down, as far as I can see, to being a photo and status feed browser. Even the status feeds are a pain: you know how going through Live friends is a pain in the ass unless you do it via the Guide Button? Well it's the same thing here and browsing status updates shoehorned onto the NXE design is just bad. It's really bad. You can't send people messages, you can't view video, you can't use Facebook chat. The one good thing is that there aren't any ads, nor should there be for this bare-bones piece of uselessness.
Last.fm
Last.fm is probably the most useful and functional out of the three. Having a jukebox in the living room could prove useful and the sound quality is pretty ok - I'd suspect 128kbps as it is over the last.fm website. Twitter and Facebook are about what I expected, Last.fm on the other hand has ads; something I was not expecting at all. As a user of Last.fm for some time, I've enjoyed listening to my recommendations and other people's radio stations ad free on my PC with no subscription. Spotify has ads, and I'm ok with that (although less so these days as the ads seem to be getting longer and more frequent) because it functions more like a media player with a massive library than a radio station. Last.fm shares the same problem with Twitter in that using Last.fm is all you can do, I don't normally sit down and just listen to music and there isn't an option here to play your stations while in-game.
All in all I'm quite indifferent if a little disappointed. Perhaps I will find further use and hopefully there is added functionality and an overhaul in design where needed coming in the future. Is there anything I've missed?