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.
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