Anyone who asks me why I own a Zune gets the same first response: the Pass. If you let me continue, my second is usually the Zune Social: an intertwined neighborhood of Zune owners where you can share your musical tastes and acquire others'. It keeps track of your listen counts and 'likes' and builds a profile of who you are as a listener that you can then compare and contrast with others.
Introduced a year after the original Zune launch (along with the much-needed Zune 2.0 software), the Zune Social was seen as Microsoft's hand extending its grasp in social networking, something it had already built up pretty well with its millions of Xbox Live subscribers. Sharing the same back end as Xbox Live, it was also really easy to build up a cachet of listener friends if you had also enlisted in Microsoft's gaming effort. Initially, the Social seemed like a grand step forward from the perception that consumers of music players were simply large dollar signs to a group of people who were really passionate about music.
It's then such a shame that the service hasn't really evolved since its introduction nearly two years ago.
From The Beginning
As a former iPod/iTunes user, I had subscribed to Last.FM- a website that plugs into your media player and records your listening patterns (or "scrobbles" as they called them) and allows you to build up friend lists and join groups of song-loving fans long before the Zune ever arrived on the scene. Undoubtedly, Microsoft was inspired by these networks when it came time to lay down the pillars of their Zune strategy. Last.FM did a fantastic job of providing very detailed and granular information- info that provided an almost insanely introspective look at how you listened to music.
I dropped Last.FM when I finally purchased my Zune 30 and a Zune Pass subscription in February 2007. I didn't really want to separate from the site, but the (dreadful) Zune 1.0 software player was unsupported. You'll have to remember that this was at a time when even Microsoft's own Windows Live Messenger failed to broadcast song titles to chat friends from Zune 1.0 when it obviously supported Windows Media Player and - gasp - iTunes. This went on for most of the year until Zune 2.0 dropped.
Along with new hardware and software, Microsoft really put their foot down in November 2007 with the Zune Social. Zune 1.0 had apparently been tracking my play counts the entire time (in secret, no less!) and provided the Social with some immediate info to put into my Zune profile. But, there were some limitations. The information wasn't granular, so you would receive your top 10 played artists and songs, but not much beyond that. Zune 2.0 software also added the ability to track more of this info through your desktop or laptop, but several movements of music from computer to computer and OS to OS have wiped away my songs' accumulative metadata many times, forcing me to rely on the Zune site for any sort of introspection.
At the center of the Zune Social is your Zune Card, which is a Silverlight-powered app on Zune.net that works in much the same way that the Xbox Live Gamercard did. The card lists your recent plays, the medals you received for listening to artists and albums (added half a year after the Social launched) and several other tracking lists. Unfortunately, out of the box, the only way to show people this information was to have them go over to your social.zune.net site.
When the Social launched, the Card was Flash powered and was presented very well on Zune.net, but unless you had a deft hand at HTML and some notepad, it pretty much stayed there. Within a week, a member had jury-rigged a solution on a personal page that allowed you to post the Card in standard and smaller-sized versions on your other social networks by generating a gaggle of HTML to copy and paste. Unfortunately at the time, the standard version was too large for my MySpace account (at the time!) and the smaller version was an almost unusable widget.
This same jury-rigged tool ended up being an official feature on Zune.net to move your Card around the internet. It gets me kind of nostalgic about 1998- only, y'know a decade later. This was really the only way you could enjoy the Zune Social, by hopping into their clubhouse.
Gated Community
Now let's be honest here since we're all friends: the Zune hasn't been a face-melting success. While the original Xbox fumbled in near last-place in the early aughts, a generational leap-frog (and a complete blunder of a launch by its direct competitor) allowed it to seize hearts, minds, and marketshare. The gradually evolving MP3 market just doesn't allow for impressive chess-like battles where zugzwang is the order of the day, you've gotta fight it out inch by inch. This has allowed some competitors to be irritatingly persistent with their domination of the field and the Zune to be seen as a lowly, underrated passion project.
This feeds into the Zune's Social, which is based on the limited number of Zune owners and subscribers. Thankfully it's growing, but not by leaps or bounds. Even the prospect of importing friends from an Xbox Live account was limiting as both services shared the same friend count limitations, truly preventing a largely intertwined community of people to occur in the first place. (This will change with the recent death of Xbox Live 1.0, thankfully.) Although at any rate, only a quarter of my Xbox Live list has a Zune account, which isn't to say a large amount have been updating recently, but that's another matter entirely.
While the smaller of pool of potential listeners compared to something like Last.FM is certainly a wrench in the potential works of Zune's Social, the real problem is the design of the Social itself: it's inclusive. In much the same way that some simple lines of HTML were required to move the Zune Card out of its own web site, Zune has shown little effort to remove the walls around its gated community in the past two years.
For reasons pointed out here, the only social network employed by a major music player directly seems laughably Web 1.0 in an era where even CNN employs Facebook 'Like' buttons on its article pages. Why can't I easily share who I am as a listener? Why can't I regularly share my top 10, 20, or 100 artists? Why can't I easily share music suggestions with people that aren't Zune owners? What about new artists I found or songs I heard? I can't share any of this!
There's very little social about the Social at all, it's a box where the dedicated dwellers have only pinholes to see the outside world. It's a dreadful waste that one of the grandest pillars of the Zune experience is such a robbing, introverted experience. It's obvious that this information exists somewhere too, otherwise the flashy (yet quite clunky) MixView feature wouldn't work at all. Sure, stuff's coming, but it hasn't been coming fast enough.
I certainly hope Microsoft wakes up soon, because other tenets of the Zune platform are amazing. I personally anticipate that with the launch of Windows Phone 7, they'll start to finally nail this down (and hopefully build some marketshare as a result), but all of these things are speculative.
Tires need to be kicked, fires need to be lit, Zune needs to be go.
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