14 DAY TRIAL // Zune users are now able to enjoy new features and functionality via Zune.net courtesy of an update introduced by Microsoft on March 3, 2009. As a result of the implementation of the update, Zune.net was offline for a part of the day, but back online as soon as the refresh was finished. Even ahead of finalization, the Redmond company indicated that the evolution of Zune.net would end up permitting Zune owners to do more compared to the previous version including streaming audio podcasts but also a new way of engaging friends via quizzes.
“The entire [Zune team] podcast catalog is now available to be browsed via Zune.net and can be subscribed to. When you pick a podcast to subscribe to, it fires up the Zune software and adds it to your Podcast collection. What’s even better though is all 12,000+ audio podcasts can now be streamed directly from Zune.net using Silverlight. So if there is an audio podcast you may want to listen to but not necessarily subscribe to (or download to your PC) - you can give it a listen on Zune.net. Currently, audio podcast streaming is available to folks in the U.S.,” revealed Brandon LeBlanc, Windows Communications Manager on the Windows Client Communications Team.
At the same time, Microsoft now offers a feature that was initially planned for availability in September 2008, concomitantly with the release of Zune 3.0. However, at that time, the software giant decided that additional features were more important than allowing users to create quizzes for their friends to answer, and the functionality was nixed from the autumn 2008 release of Zune.net.
“To try to be more "social" about Zune development, we experimented with asking the community to help design a feature, scoped to the web and to a "fun" activity that could be cordoned off from the rest of the site so we wouldn't give away our secrets. The community came up with a music trivia/quiz game, where users could write their own questions and answers and post quizzes to their own profiles. Well, this process has really sort of proven why keeping things quiet until we're ready to release is a good thing,” revealed Jessica Zahn from the Zune team.