Some things are more useful than they seem. Take 360voice.com for instance. It gives you an amusing little post each day saying what you've been doing on your xbox, but from the point of view of the xbox itself. That in itself is pretty useless past the amusement of the first few entries, but where it really comes into it's own is the RSS feed. I subscribe to the feeds of a few friends and it's a perfect way for me to see what they've been playing recently. It's much better than the proper friends UI that you tend to look at, which only tells you the last game that was played on one screen and will quite often just be the dashboard anyway, and the fuller play history is more awkward to check because it's under Compare Games and needs actively looking at and, shock, scrolling down a list. This 3rd party website is pretty much the best solution to see what your friends are up to.
What it means is that I can see when a friend gets a new game, or what they're in the mood for at the moment generally. It's also even made me buy games after kicking off a discussion about what people have been playing, which must mean that it's a good feature and shows that public APIs are always a good thing when the community word is involved.
posted @ Tuesday, July 24, 2007 5:05 PM