40 Days #9: Bring the power of social networks to the Marketplace
As the Arcade section of the Xbox 360 Dashboard slowly matured, it sprouted some pretty neat features that tied into the Xbox Live community. For instance, you could see leaderboards for your friends - outside of the game. You could also quickly send a message to a friend, telling them about the game or a feature of it, just by selecting a recipient and a message template. The new Games Library can even show you friends who are playing online right now. All those are good ideas that reinforce the fact that you are connected to a large network of other gamers, a number of whom you somehow know.
The last dashboard update also brought us the somewhat controversial Friends of Friends feature, which made a lot of secretive gamers scramble to change their settings, and restrict the traversal of their friends lists. These little touches show that Microsoft is embracing scary contemporary trends like Facebook and social networking features that seem to pervade every popular product these days. Fair enough. You've got 10 million users, so why not link them together and make the network more social. At the same time, there is one place where this type of social integration would make perfect sense, yet it it's present at the moment: the Xbox Live Marketplace.
When you browse through the hundreds (and probably thousands) of items on the Marketplace, there are sections that list the top or featured items in that category (e.g. the top movies). However, this seems to be based purely on overall popularity. I have no indication of what my friends like, for example. What I would like to see in each section (games, Arcade, movies, TV) is a way to toggle "sideways" (probably with the bumper buttons) between the overall top items and top items based on the purchases of people in my friends list. Those two lists would quite likely look very different.
Another area that lacks user input is the listing for a particular Marketplace item. Apart from the publisher information, I would like to see perhaps an Amazon-like download ranking within its category as well as some sort of rating. This could be anything from the new and controversial Zune-like love it/hate it rating to the commonly used five-star system, which would probably work out better in terms of displaying an aggregate rating for a particular item. Again, a filter might be added here to switch between an overall rating, and my friends' rating. The whole wide world might hate the demo of a niche game, but all my friends could love it, and I would like to see that distinction.
Of course, once you start rating things, adding a little review would be great, but that could overly complicate the display of Marketplace items, and would have to be policed for inappropriate content. All of that is probably more trouble than it is worth.
Similar to the Arcade feature set, I would like to see an option to recommend a Marketplace item to a friend. Suppose I find a neat video or theme - I really should be able to quickly send a message and a link to another user and tell them to check it out.
And to push the indecisive gamers off the fence, it would be interesting to be able to see which (or at least how many) of my friends have bought a particular piece of content. For example, if I play Halo 3 frequently with a group of friends, I might be a little ambivalent to purchase the latest map pack. However, if I could see that the majority of my friends have bought it, I may just give in to the peer pressure and buy it myself. An extension of this feature would be an area where I could see the latest downloads of the people on my friends list. Mind you, not necessarily per user, but for the group as a whole. That would give me a quick at-a-glance view of what my friends are downloading at any given moment, and let me discover new content.
Of course, such features would have the privacy defense force running for the hills and their tin-foil hat supply, so this would have to be an opt-out (so that it has value when first launched) system, with privacy preferences similar to those of the recent FoF feature (anybody can see these details, friends only, or nobody at all).
The ability to see what my friends like and are downloading would go a long way to easy the discoverability of content that is new to me. This is becoming increasingly necessary, given how fast the Marketplace is growing, which could cause many gamers to miss out on a variety of content. With so many users of the service, Xbox Live should leverage those friendships and connections just about everywhere, and the Marketplace makes a perfect candidate for a more social makeover.