The Xbox 360 is one of the most popular consoles across the world, managing to hold its number-two spot in spite of the attacks of its main rival, the PlayStation 3, and still being close to the Wii, thanks to its lower price as compared with that of the Nintendo platform.

But another ace up its sleeve is the variety of new features it will get around the end of the year, when Microsoft, as it revealed during its E3 conference a few weeks ago, will implement support for services like Last.FM, Twitter or Facebook, alongside other custom features like a Games on Demand section or an Avatar Marketplace.

Now, though, thanks to some eagle-eyed Xbox Live users, things are getting interesting, as a few members of the development team for the service have a special icon in their recent game section of their gamercards. It shows the Greek letter beta, which, if selected, reads Xbox 360 Beta.

People have already started speculating on whether it's Natal or some new, unannounced service, but the Xbox 360 Community Manager, Larry “Major Nelson” Hryb, has issued a statement in which he has revealed that, “Regarding that entry on my Gamercard, that's something we're testing as part of the next dashboard release (nope... not ready to announce a date yet!.) If you remember at E3, we announced avatar marketplace, and the ability for games to award avatar items. We're testing that infrastructure.”

Let's not forget that Microsoft has, seemingly, made all preparations in terms of infrastructure to Xbox Live in order to support these new services, so the development team may be trying to find bugs and problems until they will be officially launched.

Until then, though, we need to wait and settle with the current features found on the Xbox 360 and Live service.