Zune Social update

[Adam Krebs]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://zuneinsider.com/archive/2007/12/12/zune-marketplace-and-zune-social-back-online.aspx' target='_blank'>http://zuneinsider.com/archive/2007/12/12/zune-marketplace-and-zune-social-back-online.aspx</a><br /><br /></div>You may have noticed that Zune Social was down for the last few days <br /><br />Included (according to <a target="_blank" href="http://zuneinsider.com/archive/2007/12/12/zune-marketplace-and-zune-social-back-online.aspx">Cesar</a>):<ul> <li><em>Improved overall stability and performance </em></li> <li><em>Ability to view Favorites on your profile and the ability to remove a favorite </em></li> <li><em>Most played artists will be displayed on your Zune Card, including three of the top songs for each of those artists (based on community usage) </em></li> <li><em>Zune Gadgets Page: <a href="http://social.zune.net/profile/gadgets.aspx">http://social.zune.net/profile/gadgets.aspx</a></em> </li> <li><em>Ability to view up to 24 recently played songs and 24 most played artists (increased from 5) </em></li> <li><em>Easier to remove friends (directly from the friends activity module) </em></li> <li><em>Timestamp for your recently played songs </em></li> <li><em>Song and album information is now displayed in the send dialogs</em> </li></ul><p><img alt="" border="1" src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/500/zt/auto/1197606428.usr495.jpg" /><br />I'm seeing a lot of the &quot;stability and performance&quot; upgrades, especially in Firefox, though for some reason, a few of the features are quirkier than last time (the &quot;add to friends&quot; link seems to only work when it feels like it, logging in is similar, e.g.), though this may just be due to Firefox's own weirdnesses.<br /><br />Also, I got kind of excited by the idea of being able to remove a &quot;favorite song,&quot; but I guess that isn't fully there yet either (or I'm missing something). I'm also beginning to see a bit of feature creep, as the lists don't seem to be scaling well to the design of the page. I hope they do something about that in the future, but for now I like the integration between the more static HTML and the cool Flash design.</p><p>EDIT: I knew I wasn't crazy! Jay-Z, my top-played artist,&nbsp;now shows 25 plays, when just yesterday (see above) it showed 26. The same thing with De La Soul a couple days ago (20 down to 19). Social seems to pick-and-choose which songs it wants to have show up on the &quot;played&quot; list. Sometimes, songs I know are supposed to show up (because their metadata is correct and have shown up before), simply don't. It's a little frustrating, and I hope it's just a small issue that'll be fixed soon. Then again, this <em>is</em> a beta...</p><p><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/500/zt/auto/1197677894.usr495.jpg" border="1" alt="" /></p><p>P.S. Not sure where Train came from... I looked&nbsp;through my computer and I'm pretty sure I don't have any of their songs...</p>

[Sven Johannsen]

P.S. Not sure where Train came from... I looked through my computer and I'm pretty sure I don't have any of their songs...

Let me put on my evile empire conspiracy hat for a moment. Bet artists are paying MS to seed influential Zuners pages with their names and songs. ;)

[bleeman]

I'm not sure if you've figured out the "Remove Favorite" option, so just in case (or for anyone 'reading over our shoulder) here's how you do it:

Go to your profile on Zune.net (http://social.zune.net/profile/home.aspx)
Scroll down to your "My Favorites" section in the list on the right side of the screen.
Click on the name of the song you wish to remove from your Favorites list (When you hover over the song name you'll see the underline appear so it looks like a hyperlink)
Once clicked the entry will expand and you'll have three choices:
Send, Buy, Remove
Click on Remove
That's it. Your song should now be removed from the "My Favorites" list.

[Adam Krebs]

Let me put on my evile empire conspiracy hat for a moment. Bet artists are paying MS to seed influential Zuners pages with their names and songs. ;)

I dunno... I kinda doubt they'd wanna be associated with Train. It's not exactly the definition of hipness...

And I found out where it came from; I had it on my old Zune30 which was previously sync'd with my old computer (and was associated with my ZuneTag). I can't believe I've listened to that one song 10 times though... :D

And Bill, I'm not seeing that, on Firefox or IE... It just gives me the "fav" button again (even though I'm on Favorites). When I click it, it just re-adds that track to the top of the favorites list. Odd.

[bleeman]

Adam,

Are you clicking on the Favorite you want to remove in your Zune card or on the entry in the "My Favorites" to the right of the card when you're on your Zune Profile page? I ask as you mentioned just getting the Fav button.

I'm using IE7 and it's working for me. Here's a screen capture of my Profile page showing you my options:

http://bleeman.spaces.live.com/photos/cns!E57821943AFFFD9C!336 (I couldn't figure out how to embed the screen shot)

I've put red arrows on the section I'm talking about and you can see the Remove option just below the entry. It took me awhile to figure out where I was supposed to go to do this too. I kept trying to do it from my Zunecard rather than my Profile.

[Adam Krebs]

Ohhhhh! I have to be on the Home.aspx page, I can't just be on my ZuneCard page. I guess it can't tell whether you're who you're looking at.

But thanks!

[bleeman]

You're welcome! And no worries on finding the right page. The difference between you and me was I didn't have an editor's job like you do where I had to post my question to "the world" :) You don't want to know how long it took me to find it ;)

Have a good weekend!

[Adam Krebs]

Wow. That is truly weird. Something must be completely wrong with their playcount algorithm. I checked today, and, after playing the entire album of both "3 Feet High And Rising" by De La Soul and "Stereotypez" by Special Teamz, the artist playcount went back down to 19 and 15 respectively. Dr. Dre went from 11 to 9. I'm really just confused as to how or why this is happening.

I played a bunch of Beatles songs (57), and only 2 registered on Social. These are all tagged correctly, but it seems there's still some work to do before this leaves beta.