Music, culture, and the inside scoop from Cesar Menendez,
a Microsoft employee working on Zune - Microsoft's new music project.

December 12, 2007

Zune Marketplace and Zune Social Back Online

We’re back online; the updates are live. You may have noticed that Zune Social got some enhancements, namely:

  • Improved overall stability and performance
  • Ability to view Favorites on your profile and the ability to remove a favorite
  • Most played artists will be displayed on your Zune Card, including three of the top songs for each of those artists (based on community usage)
  • Zune Gadgets Page: http://social.zune.net/profile/gadgets.aspx
  • Ability to view up to 24 recently played songs and 24 most played artists (increased from 5)
  • Easier to remove friends (directly from the friends activity module)
  • Timestamp for your recently played songs
  • Song and album information is now displayed in the send dialogs

These enhancements are, for the most part, in response to both usability testing and feedback from users in the forums – we’re listening and the team is continually working to improve the overall Zune experience.

 |  Wednesday, December 12, 2007 8:39 PM  |  28 Comments

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Jaxim

Are firmware/software updates next? Soon? I hope.

:-)

Mark

woo, some improvements very early are good to see.

mdotbb

well done.  I like the tweaks.

jonathan broderick

anyone else think the time spent improving the social could of been time spent improving the zune software/firmware? just think the energy should of been focused away from the zune social pet project and into the device itself, imo.

Eddie

That's great to hear Cesar. I'd like to suggest something for the social. Can you guys add a easy way to search for friends? Like myspace; be able to find them by searching their email, name, or anything revolving around that. Or search by their favorite artists or currently favorite songs.

tomeppy

Some nice enhancements here. I dig having recently played tracks and top artists seperated.

Willy

How do you remove a favorite?

David Molnar

For some reason, the software and Social have lost all my Combichrist and Cocteau Twins plays. I've gone from hundreds of plays of each to _zero_. maybe this is a meta data corruption issue on my end, because the other people who were mentioned before for those artists are still there.

Other than that, looks cool. The extra info in the zune card is a step forward.

kristov

is there any way that zune social we'll be open for anyone around the world..i can't show my recently played songs on my zune card..

Donna (Zune user ID Gabey8)

I have one question -- my total number of plays for my top artist has dropped from over 1500 to approximately half that (758 or so, but my Zune software is playing even as I type so that number will probably be incremented).

I had a Gremlin crop up on my Zune a day or two ago, whereby it wouldn't play anything and kept giving me "item not available or has been removed" errors on every song. To fix it, I renamed my Zune folders on the PC, synced (which cleared the Zune of all music), restored the Zune folders to their proper names, and synced again (all my music was restored to the Zune).

Now, my question: did my actions affect my total number of artist plays appearing on my Zune card, or did the updates on Zune's side make the difference? Or both?

Mike

sweet, glad to see you're updating it :D

Andrea Avellan "Pinksage"

uuuuuu. I woke up with morning like.."What the...I'm I crazy or is this different?" I like!! (Borat voice)

Zune One

Looks really good! Now I want even more though, how about the ability to download complete statistics including least played, then I know what to delete.

Also would like recommendations based on my listening history.

dsba

Zune Social looking much better now, thanks Zune Team!

If you are listening, then... Still waiting for the advanced features (enhanced rating for songs, DJ features, Clock?, Device item removal, auto playlists, EQ on the new v2 Zunes and others...)

sportsunit

Zune team, if you're listening....  Download history for subscriptions still won't load. It gets stuck at varying percentages for different users. There's a nice long thread over on zune.net with  numberous users outlining their problems.  Customer support and mods cannot help us.  Seems to be a backend issue.  http://forums.zune.net/15482/ShowPost.aspx

Khidr

Glad to see you guys are keeping your ears to the ground, nice enhancements.  Also, I love how unrelated to your posts some of the comments on this blog are.  (Not Jaxim specifically)  Like the one in response to your last post asking for a case for his 30.  :)  

Chris

Cesar,

Any word on the battery drain issue yet?

MNZuning

Nice improvements Ceasar. I hope the team can crank out some improvements for the 2.0 software next. While I appreciate the ease of use for a novice that the new software provides, I miss the greater functionality provided by the old 1.0 version.

I've basically gone from using it to manage my library to just managing what's on my device. I miss being able to do both in one package.

gab0

international zuners will have access to zune social and zune cards?.. as i know, all our plays are not shown in our zune cards... you may want to improve that

greetings from chile

lilsalmon

Love the enhancements, however I would have hope that fixing the bugs in the software would have been the first priority. A tad bit dissapointed that you guys are focusing on a piece of the experience that was pretty polished versus the piece that has well documented bugs that should be fixed.

-Lil'

LiveRJ

jonathan broderick I totally disagree with you.  

1 - I think these tweaks to the social make it much more useful, descriptive and fun.  2 - I doubt that developers working on the Social take away from developers working on whatever you want out of a Zune firmware patch.

Thank you Zune Team!

DivingDancer

Agreed.  The Zune Social developers are an entirely different team than the folks working on the desktop client, and yet another team working on the firmware.  Those are all very different disciplines.

Have some faith, folks.  2.0 is a damned nice piece of engineering.  Sure, it has some issues.   But as much as I loved my original 30, I REALLY love it now.

Cesar, my thanks to the team for all the great work.  I look forward to seeing what's next.

Gizmodo

The Zune Social, Zune's social networking site, just got a slight upgrade yesterday. Besides general stability and performance enhancements, there's navigation improvements that let you remove friends and view song and album information in send dialogues.

Fucked Punk Blog

The Zune Social, Zune's social networking site, just got a slight upgrade yesterday. Besides general

Tech|noob

The Zune Social, Zune's social networking site, just got a slight upgrade yesterday. Besides general

Joe

I guess there still isn't a fix for the Podcast un-subscribing themselves.

loic54

This actually messed up my number of played tracks, It took like 400 plays away from the Mars Volta...

Josh's Windows Weblog

Microsoft had a really busy week this week. Unfortunately, it coincided with an IPv6 class I was taking

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