With Project Natal, the Xbox 360’s just announced camera-based motion controller, Microsoft is clearly making a play for the casual gamers who helped make Nintendo’s Wii such a rousing success. But a series of smaller announcements on Monday show how the company is hoping to rein in the online social networker.
The video above shows how Microsoft plans to integrate Facebook and Twitter with the Xbox 360’s operating system sometime this fall. You’ll be able to link your Xbox Live gamertag with your Facebook and Twitter profiles, which will give you access to your friends and followers through your game console. If you’re like me and have the Xbox 360’s Chatpad keyboard that plugs into the console’s wireless controllers, you might never use Facebook on your home PC again.
Xbox Live Gold subscribers (the folks who pay $35-$50 a year to play games over Xbox Live and stream movies from their Netflix Instant Queue) will be getting another perk in the form of Last.fm integration. Details of how this service will work were relatively scant, but at a minimum, you should be able to listen to music, rate it and have the service suggest other music for you to listen to based on other users likes and dislikes. Hopefully, we’ll be able to listen to Last.fm music in the background while we play games and navigate the Twitter and Facebook channels. It’d be a shame if Last.fm was its own self-contained thing. As an aside: With all these cool, Web 2.0 features coming to the 360, how long is it gonna be until the system gets an actual Web browser, you know like the ones on the PlayStation 3 and the Wii? Doesn’t Microsoft already have a Web browser it could integrate?
Lastly, and this doesn’t hold much of an immediate draw for U.S. gamers, Microsoft announced a partnership with British satellite TV provider Sky that will allow U.K. 360 owners to stream a limited number of TV channels. I’m sure this feature will be walled off and inaccessible to U.S. gamers, but it hints at the possibility for more streaming video partnerships down the road. Bring me MLB.TV, guys.
