40 Days #17: Transition from Live Anywhere to RSS everywhere

One of the most thought-provoking screenshots from the now seemingly forgotten Windows Mobile Live Anywhere client is the image seen here on the right. It depicts a notification that a new piece of content is available for a particular game title.

That doesn't seem so far fetched, until you consider that the current console and Marketplace system has no provision for granular notifications like this. The 360 only ever "knows" about new content when you go into some Marketplace screen, and it refreshes the content from the servers.

But what if it could know? How would this work? If Microsoft had a PC-based Marketplace, it would make sense to allow gamers to use plain old RSS feeds to subscribe to various sources of news from the Marketplace itself. Just like buyers can create RSS feeds based on the results of a specific query search on eBay, the Marketplace should be able to provide custom RSS feeds for content searches. For example you could subscribe to a feed about new items for Call of Duty 4. Then any time a new piece of content matching those criteria hits the Marketplace, your favorite RSS reader can let you know.

Of course, seeing little pop-up toasts on your PC when a new map pack is released is neat, but the real utility would come out of the console itself becoming capable of consuming such RSS feeds - and reacting to events based on the data within them. Now you could get that message about the map pack on the console, as soon as it comes out. Better yet, how about a set of settings that would allow the console to automatically download this content? Create a search query - say, any content related to Fable 2 - and have the console download it all whenever it appears in the Marketplace.

This would have to be applicable to only free content, and the search query would probably need options to tweak the maximum size or amount of the items. On the other hand, I'm sure there are some hardcore gamers who would want automated downloads of at least certain paid content too. Maybe have the console contact the mobile Live Anywhere client and ask for permission to auto-spend your points?

Obviously, with all this automatic behind-the-scenes activity going on, the console would have to notify its owner when such things have occurred. Perhaps some sort of summary message (so many items downloaded since you last signed in) when the owner logs in, or turns on the console from its connected standby mode (which would be required for such automatic downloading to work). Even a simple message in the inbox would do nicely. Just something to help explain why all my disk space got inexplicably eaten up overnight.