Microsoft today announced that they would be including a pretty tight integration of Facebook connect into the XBox live system. There are two parts to this story, one is that all future XBox games will allow users to post back information to their Facebook Streams and walls based off achievements in games, high scores etc. Facebook connect will also be used to pull in friends and marry them up to your Xbox live account.

The second part is that there is going to effectively be a Facebook application on the XBox which will allow you to see friends photos, comments, videos etc.

All this news came from the Gizmodo Live stream which is following the E3 conference, where by the big names in the gaming industry show off whats new. I am very surprised that Nintendo haven’t jumped on the Facebook bandwagon as it would seem to fit very well with the Wii.

Edit: At the Nintendo conference in the afternoon, they announced that the DSI would integrate with Facebook to allow users to upload photos straight from the device.

There are some suspected 20 million + XBox live owners, and since Facebook connect now integrates with 3rd party websites, iPhone applications, the XBox, and now DSI we should surely see it grow and grow into a monster application.

A while ago i wrote a post about Facebook stalking and how Facebook had created a news feed preference page so that you could adjust what sort of stories you see in your news feed. One of the most interesting things about this was that you could specify friends who you would ‘like to see more of’ and of course friends who you would ‘like to see less of’, however i am convinced that after the recent roll out of the new news feed that none of these preferences even work.

Hi, we no longer work

Here’s the deal, i have some rather annoying friends, people who i love dearly in real life but cannot stand the junk they post on Facebook. I can’t really remove them as friends because they are friends in real life, so i wanted a way to not see the crap they post unless i specifically go to their profile page. After the introduction of the feed prefs i added these people and sure enough they literally NEVER appeared in my news feed. Since the new home page roll out though, these people are continually in my feed and literally doing my head in. On the feed prefs page, it states…

You can select up to 200 friends that you prefer not to see in your News Feed. You will only get stories about these people if nothing else is available

Now i have over 600 friends (yes i am a whore and, yes they are not all real friends) and the people that I have added to the ‘see less of list’ are still appearing. Are you trying to tell me that out of 600 people, there isn’t enough ‘news’ that it has to show me MULTIPLE news stories about people i don’t want to see anything about? I think not.

To me, it seems quite apparent that the whole news feed prefs is broken and simply doesn’t work, i don’t know if Facebook know about this, or even if they care. But it definately needs looking at. Whilst they are at it, there should be away to stay friends with people but not show anything about them at all on your news feed.

Go ahead and try it, add someone who you know is a big Facebook user to the ‘see less of’ list’ and then watch as it changes absolutely NOTHING!

Facebook, please fix this, some of us ‘power users’ would like functionality that you offer to actually work, thanks.