New Xbox.com features?

So… LIVE was down for more than 24 hours… the website was down was longer… and then once back up, people weren’t able to sign in…

But now… Now it’s entirely back up and working…

And I can’t help but wonder: What exactly changed?

Anyone notice any changes?

I havent seen any

Its slower. I noticed that change right away.

What’s really weird is that really “cool” new features were supposed to be part of this update.

I definitely can’t find anything fitting that bill. Actually… I just can’t spot anything new.

I read a thread elsewhere that mentioned the new feature was some sort of parental control.

Working? It’s not working for me. I can’t sign in and see friends lists or do any of that; all the sign in pages tell me–apologetically–that they can’t be found.

Isn’t it about time someone started a new thread decrying Microsoft as the one and only true devil?

You can add points through the website now, or at least I don’t recall seeing that there before. You can now also tweak the parental controls and select more gamer pics (though still not the full set of choices) when editing your profile through xbox.com

they would, but IE keeps crashing

You’re welcome to start it K0NY.

I was under the impression that the downtime was for maintanence and that the update would follow in a couple of weeks.

Whoah, Jake passed on creating a thread?

true. The mistake was telling everyone that ‘this isnt the fall update, it’s maintanence for 24 hours, but we are adding some stuff you’ll think is very cool’ or some such nonsense.

Then they take about 48 hours, and made their points buying available, and some parental controls. I know thats what most gamers think is ‘COOL!’

It may also have been a chance for them to do some back-end upgrades to allow them to do some testing of the new features on the live services, but before they update everyone’s client to expose those features.

shrug Just a guess.

I’m telling K0NY to start a thread…

Because I intend to start a poll on it.

You can now add microsoft points from the website - I’m not sure but I’ve been told that wasn’t there before. I also heard something about parental controls on the website, but I don’t see anything obvious.

The official Microsoft games PR blog has probably the real explanation:

“The servers and software were upgraded to prepare for updates that will go live later this month. You shouldn’t see any noticeable changes right now. We’re preparing details about he updates going into Xbox.com and Xbox Live, that we’ll share with you next week.”

I hope what they mean is that the Fall dashboard update is coming later this month, and not that there will just be some new website features later this month. Anyway, sounds like we’ll hear specifics next week.

I’m reading elsewhere that there are new privacy settings? I don’t have an account so I wouldn’t know.