Major Nelson recently posted a call to everyone interested in the future of Xbox to post either in the comments on his site or in the comments of the original post on this topic over at Ozymandias. He asked that the Xbox community detail its ideas for improving Xbox 360, Live, and Xbox.com, and the Xbox team would then take this feedback and use it to determine what should be included in future updates to the various Xbox platforms. This is just another example of why I love Xbox and the team behind it. Unlike many other companies who decide what they're going to do and stick to it regardless of what the community thinks, Microsoft's Xbox team has always been very good at reaching out to the community and asking for its input. As a result, past dashboard updates have made significant improvements to the Xbox 360 experience, and many if not most of the changes were at the direct request of the community. Xbox 360, Xbox Live, and Xbox.com are continuously evolving and improving, and we as the community are the main driving force in deciding how they change next.

 

Naturally, I couldn't resist this chance to let my opinion be heard. It took a little while and a decent amount of thinking, but I finally came up with this list of 30 ideas that would improve Xbox 360, Xbox Live, and the Xbox.com website. This list doesn't include all of my ideas, but I think it does highlight the changes that I think are most crucial if the Xbox platform is to continue to improve.

 

1. Keep releasing new updates to improve back-compat.

 

2. It's currently very slow trying to go up one level when browsing music. It needs to be much faster like it is when using the other console menus.

 

3. There needs to be a way to categorize one's friends list. Sure, I remember who most of them are, but it would be nice to easily and quickly see who is online that I often play Halo, Gears of War, Rainbow Six, etc with. One option is groups like Windows Live Messenger has. Another, better option is tagging. Allow me to make custom tags/labels like "Halo 2" and apply this label and others to any Live friend I choose. An option to message or invite all friends in a certain group/tag would be nice as well.

 

4. Allow me to keep a short, private comment on each of my friends viewable only by me on my console and on Xbox.com. This will make it easier to remember who a person is and to keep notes about future meeting times, etc.

 

5. When streaming from Windows Media Player 11, I am currently unable to stream track 1 in each of my albums. I should be able to stream all my tracks regardless of their track number.

 

6. I still can't see the ads on my Xbox Live blade. I've had Xbox Live since fairly early into its lifetime on the original Xbox. It gets very annoying constantly seeing "what are you waiting for?" I'm not waiting for anything. I joined years ago and I want that message to go away. I want my ads. If age is a concern, it shouldn't be a problem because I am over 18.

 

7. Support more video codecs. WMV is great, but I'd also like divx, xvid, .mov, and maybe even flash video. Other codecs would be welcome as well.

 

8. A universal, cross-game clan option accessible from the dashboard and guide. Unique clans for each game would also be welcome, because while I may like to play Rainbow Six with a certain group of people, I may like playing Halo 3 with a totally different group. The universal clan could be simply for people who I just like to play with and associate with regardless of the game.

 

9. The ability to listen to voice messages on Xbox.com and save them as mp3's.

 

10. The ability to view Live Vision pictures on Xbox.com and save them as jpg's.

 

11. The ability to send pictures using Xbox.com.

 

12. The ability to stream videos downloaded from Xbox Live on my Windows PC. This includes purchased content such as TV shows and movies.

 

13. I should be able to search the Xbox Live marketplace by keyword and results should be as fast and accurate as Google. The current categories are helpful, but there will come a point where it will be much faster to do a search for "halo" to find Halo 3 content instead of browsing for it the old-fashioned way.

 

14. Instead of just saying "Play game", my dashboard should say "Play" followed by the name of the game in the DVD drive.

 

15. I should be able to chat with more than one other person within the same chat session. If you have to, you can require that all people in the chat be in the 360 dashboard and make the chat a sort of application in itself (like it was on the original Xbox). A better option is to allow me to chat with more than one person while doing anything as I currently can with private chat. As each additional person joins the chat, make one of the private chat slots unavailable so that I don't use any more bandwidth than the current version where I can have a few individual private chats.

 

16. Allow me to see the negative feedback I left on a person. It's great that I can see in my recent players list that I left them bad feedback, but it could be helpful to see what that feedback was. For example, if I left negative feedback for a person not being good enough at a game and now they are good at it, I might want to change my mind and prefer them. However, just seeing that sad face next to their name might make me want to never prefer them even though I might enjoy playing with them now.

 

17. Provide a defragmentation utility accessible from the System blade. As I download and delete large pieces of content regularly, I'm sure that my hard drive is becoming rather fragmented. Along with this utility, include the option to cancel the defragmentation process at any time in case I suddenly decide that I need to use the console.

 

18. Discounts or occasional sales on marketplace content for Gold members.

 

19. Increase the maximum number of friends to 200. The current limit of 100 is simply too restricting for most online gaming enthusiasts, despite however low the average number of Xbox Live friends may be.

 

20. Allow me to do other things besides editing the id3 tags while a CD is being ripped to the hard drive. It would also be nice if I could listen to a song as soon as it has been ripped instead of waiting for the entire CD to be ripped.

 

21. Add more trims for the 360 dashboard blades.

 

22. Remove Xbox Live Arcade demos from played game lists, including the gamer card.

 

23. Provide a way for a person to capture a screenshot or video of his current game and allow the person to send this picture as a picture message to other Live members.

 

24. There should be a way to try out gamer pics from the 360 dashboard. Perhaps when browsing picture packs, there could be an option that allows you to see your gamer card with each of the gamer pictures you are considering.

 

25. There also needs to be a way to try out themes before buying. One option is to allow a person to use it on his console for a minute and then have it automatically display a message asking if the person wants to buy the theme. If he says no, it's automatically deleted.

 

26. It's nice having status messages telling people if I'm online, away, etc., but it would also be nice if I could set a custom message, particularly for when I'm away.

 

27. It's nice that we can now fast-forward/rewind while watching a video, but we should also have this option for music. It's been a standard features on PCs and regular old CD players for many years, so it's only right that 360 should have it as well.

 

28. Provide a way to download original Xbox free downloadable content to the 360 hard drive using the marketplace instead of the in-game option. Sure, I could pop in each disc and use its custom downloader to download maps and other content, but marketplace is just so much easier.

 

29. It would be fun to see a list on Xbox.com showing how many people are currently playing a game while connected to Live. It's always interesting visiting Bungie.net and seeing how many people are playing Halo 2. It would be even more fun if I could do this for all games in one convenient place. Plus, if I see that no one is playing a game, it might save me the trouble of popping in the disc.

 

30. I love downloading free content from marketplace, but it gets annoying when I have to browse through every game just to find a free gamer picture here and there. There needs to be a way to browse only the free content on marketplace.

 

This list of ideas can also be viewed in the comments section of Major Nelson's post by going here.