I can’t believe it, I got on to another XBL Preview! Yay! This one is for the new Twitter/Facebook/LastFM apps and the new Zune HD Marketplace. I use Facebook, Twitter and LastFM quite a lot so this has been quite interesting for me to have a play around with.

I do like it so far, although there are some niggly bits. The social networking apps seem to be removed from the 360 experience itself which I think detracts from the point of them a little.

I did enjoy logging in to LastFM and listening to my music library there, although I have upnp media servers installed so could listen to my own music anyway. Nice that it scrobbles though.

Facebook looks like it’s had the most time spent on it. I think it works pretty well. As I’ve got my XBL account linked to my Facebook account now I’d have expected it to update when I got an achievement or at least have the option to do this. It doesn’t, although this is no big deal as I already have a Facebook app which does this.

Twitter isn’t all that useful for me at the moment, not because I don’t use it, I do. A lot. The 360 isn’t the best place to use it though as it has no browser so every time I saw a tweet with a link I had to use my netbook to look at it instead. It also doesn’t tie in with your XBL account so it won’t update when you get achievements (there are some services around which do this though).

I was really excited about the Zune HD marketplace as I’ve read that they’ve really improved streaming for people with less than great internet connections (that’d be me). Sadly there’s nothing there I want to watch. I’ve either seen them, got them, or I have no interest in the films available. Might’ve been nice to add a short free HD clip we could test with.

I couldn’t check out the Inside News feature as it’s US only.

The Facebook and LastFM apps benefit from being things you can just sign into and forget until you’re feeling lazy and want to use them (seeing Facebook photos on my big TV was pretty nice). The Twitter one falls down here because even if I decide to use it just to check tweets rather than post them, I can’t with about 80% of them because they contain links and photos. I also don’t like the way Twitter doesn’t automatically log you in. It remembers your details but sits waiting for you to press the login button. MS needs to add a browser. It’ll make all this stuff so much better. Twitter without a browser is so neutered.

Recently there’s been a lot of talk about Spotify. I have to admit it took longer for me to check it out than normal because it was being compared to Pandora, and try as I might I just didn’t along with Pandora. I occasionally used LastFM‘s radio feature, but I own a hell of a lot of music. I’ve been buying CDs since I got my first CD player in 1989, they take up a lot of room.

Unlike a lot of people I don’t hate iTunes, it is a bit slow with the amount of music I have, and since I got my new iPod Touch I am no longer able to use iTunes on my win2k server machine. This means most of the music is run from a network directory making iTunes on my XP PC even slower. Not great… it also skips sometimes if I have FireFox open. I used to use foobar2k but as I have an iPod that needs this PC to sync now I ended up using iTunes more and more. I gave SongBird a go but found it slow and it was worse at dealing with networked music than iTunes.

Anyway, I finally gave Spotify a go the other night. Signed up for the free account as I wanted to see how the ads worked. I was impressed. Linking it up to my lastFM account made me happy as I really love my lastFM and probably wouldn’t use anything that didn’t update it. It’s very quick, it hasn’t skipped on me at all yet which is good as my internet connection is pretty dire speedwise and most things give me the dreaded ‘buffering’ messages. The image/text ads are really small and unobtrusive. I didn’t get very many of them either. It took a good while to get my first audio advert. This is where it really impressed me. It’s not particularly clever, it’s just a small thing that pleased me greatly. When you get the audio ads (mine were nearly all about Climate Change awareness so I’m fine with that!) you can’t skip them, that’s expected, but the best things I found were that they aren’t scrobbled to lastFM and also they don’t show up in your IM status if you have ‘currently playing’ selected. Awesome! How good is that?! So simple, yet it made me really happy.

One downside I’ve found is that the radio options aren’t very good for me. They don’t seem to be all that accurate. You can skip as much as you like though. The best use I’ve found for it is to create your own playlist (or find one on the vast number of spotfy playlist sites sprouting up) and preview albums/artists you’ve wanted to give a go, but don’t want to buy just in case you don’t like them.