Some of you may have noticed that I’ve got a special background on my Zune profile page…and that when you add me as a friend, I accept right away.

Well, I wish I were that quick to respond! But actually, what you’re seeing is our one-way friends feature. As many of you as want to can add me – but I don’t have access to any of your personal information or play data. (You can add Cesar too, but we’re in a race for the most one-way friends…and I’m winning, so please help me keep it that way.)

This was a new feature with our Spring release – and it became somewhat controversial. You see, we used the one-way friend feature to automatically added special users to new and some existing users. I have to say, I’ve never received quite so much passionate feedback before.

The idea has merit.  We wanted to start out those users with Zune DJs: a set of carefully-selected people who work here whose job it is to program music for Zune Marketplace. Each Zune DJ has different genres for which he or she is responsible. We figured people who are interested in discovering new music on Zune Social might be interested in getting fresh recommendations from people here at Zune who discover and recommend music for a living. So when you sign up for Zune Social, you get six Zune DJs automatically added to your page, for each of the major genres: rock, country, techno, hip hop, world, and Latin.

Since the relationships are one-way, the Zune DJs don’t know a thing about the users connected to them; all they can find out is the total number of people who have added them.  Also, one-way friends is a different system than our two-way friend system, and isn’t subject to the 100-friend maximum.

Looking back with my dev team 20/20 vision, we could have done a better job explaining these one-way friends, because some users were worried that random people were going to see their play data and other personal information.

We did find that when we explained to users how these Zune DJ friends worked, they understood and felt it was a desirable feature. And then they wanted more: “Where’s the classic rock DJ?” “Where’s the pop music DJ?” people asked.

But from other users, we heard, “I have nothing in common with those people!”

That last comment totally made sense to me. My musical taste aligns with the Zune DJs Kid Hops and DJ Ms E. But I rarely have any albums or artists in common with them, because they’re getting the latest music, stuff I haven’t discovered yet. So of course I’m not going to recognize the names they’re playing…yet. For me, that’s cool. For other people, not so much.

So what does Zune do with this feedback?

I take it very seriously, actually. And while I can’t give away our roadmap, I can say that we’re planning significant changes in how the Zune DJs are added to people’s friends list, how the feature is messaged, and in addition, looking at a number of other ways to help users find friends and new music recommendations.

Keep the feedback coming – it definitely makes a difference!