Xbox Live Update for November 17

Tonight will be the official premiere of a new set of applications for the Xbox 360. Many of these were featured prominently at this year's E3:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Last.fm
• Zune Marketplace
• News and More

Upcoming this weekend is another available timespan for those with Silver accounts to try out the features normally only allowed to Gold subscribers. This is scheduled to begin November 20 (12 pm ET / 9 am PT) and last until November 23 (12 pm ET / 9 am PT). Update: The European regions of Live will be holding an alternative free Gold timespan. This will run starting November 25th from 17:00 GMT until November 30th at 17:00 GMT. Hit "Read more" for impressions of this update. There are details you may not be aware of. As an aside, I myself had been fortunate enough to get into the preview program which had been running the last few weeks. As usual, there is a bit more and a bit less than expected with this update. First (and possibly most importantly), Microsoft will be disallowing unauthorized storage devices to be used with the console. Supposedly this pretty much applies to a number of large Datel memory units. I've heard that Datel won't necessarily be backing off so easily, so if you own one of these cards you may wish to look into this. Second, many of the additions can only be used with a Gold membership and are also only currently available to those over the age of 18 (although they are currently working on controls to allow younger users in). This is more focused towards the social apps. Third, Last.fm unfortunately cannot be used as a general music stream. You can't use it in games or even around the dashboard. The app itself is pretty nice though. Hopefully they will adapt it to be used as another stream in the future. Fourth, Facebook and Twitter have somewhat limited capabilities. They are not bad for features on a set top box, but they are limited in functionality without more ties to the internet. In the future, some games will be able to make use of integration with "Facebook Connect". This will allow players to show off their achievements in a game...even going so far as to be able to post in-game screenshots right to their Facebook page. This functionality is limited to those games which either ship with it or (potentially) have it patched in. The other stuff works about as well as they've said. The rebranded Zune Marketplace does work as intended with its claim of having instant-on 1080p with 5.1 surround sound on a decent connection. It definitely seems to be less integrated though than the old video marketplace was, so it may be somewhat jarring at first. News and More is simply news segments as well as some animated Dilbert and The New Yorker comics. All in all, it's not your standard set of technical updates, but it does provide functionality that some people will find convenient. I myself hope that it all becomes more integrated in the future. It used to be necessary to queue instant Netflix material from a computer and they did come up with somewhat of a solution for that...so we'll have to see. I'm sure it would at least make quite a few people happy if Last.fm were usable as a music stream.