360voice Dev Blog

Live Back - No Blogs for today

Hey all live is back up, but because we don't have any live data for 9/29 due to the outage, there will be no blogs today (Tuesday 9/30).  We are back in action though and will update people as we bring things back to normal, thanks for everyones patience. For streaks 9/29 won't count for or against you, and you will need to play today, to keep your streak.

UPDATE: Streaks are turned off, for 10/1 blog, since on 9/30 it was possible some folks had problems getting on.  So everyone will get credit for playing 9/30.  We will keep monitoring the situation, so let us know if you run into anything strange.

Strangeness today

With the live outage, we are seeing some weirdness on the site with database connections. A while back we wrote timeouts into all of the places where we request resources from Xbox Live, but for some reason that doesn't seem to be working... We are looking into the issues.

Update 9/29/2008 2:59pm ET

We have turned off a few features to keep the site smoothly flowing during the Xbox Live outage... should keep the forums and stuff up for now. We will continue to monitor it and turn things back on as soon as it looks like it won't nuke us.

Update 9/30/2008 12:05am ET

I am going to leave blogs off until we can get everything back from Xbox Live. We will be pulling tonight and seeing what happens, but we don't plan on getting any data, so we will most likely skip entries for everyone. Steve will take a look at the data tonight and we will let everyone know in the morning what happens.

Duplicates in groups prevented

I was getting a few reports of people having duplicate members in their groups and also not being able to delete them if there are duplicates. I have fixed both cases I believe. Now it should be pretty impossible to get duplicate members in the group... and if you do get one, you can delete that duplicate without nuking the other entries.

Let me know if you continue to have problems.

Dashboard upgrade - 9/29 - Streaks safe!

I just wanted to let everyone know that we are aware of the outage for the Xbox Dashboard update on Sept 29th. We will be turning off streaks so that no one loses anything. Once the dashboard is back up and everything is verified to be working, we will turn streaks back on...

To be safe though, I encourage anyone with a long streak to try and put in a microblog entry for the day to lock in some gameplay. It is always good to have data!

As always we will keep everyone updated on the Dashboard outage and how it impacts our system.

Yay for new stuff though! I don't know about you, but I am excited for the update. For me, new is always better than same!

360voice on Techradar.com

Looks like Techradar.com says that 360voice is the #3 trick that Microsoft doesn't tell you about the Xbox 360!

3. It can write its own blog

Ah, the internet – founded upon crazy men making crazy things for free. Such as a blog supposedly written by your 360, based on what you've been using it for. It monitors your Live account and automatically generates entries about what it's been up to that day (or what it hasn't been up to – expect many posts about neglect if you don't turn it on for a while). The tone is very much American geek, but it's a fun record of your own gaming habits, and of keeping an eye on what your chums are up to. Get set up at www.360voice.com.

Read more

If you are jumping over from Techradar.com, welcome to the site!

I like how they said we are "American Geek!" :)

Your Xbox has Groups

New feature today! Your Xbox now has groups.

How do they work?

1. You have to be logged in to create groups (meaning you need an account)
2. Go to the create groups page.
3. Create your own group!
4. Or go to the group list and join a group.
5. You get all sorts of aggregate stats and a group blog with activity summary on active group members each day.

Easy as pie! That is it for now... consider this a trial run. I am already thinking of enhancements we can make to this... and of course there are APIs that will be documented... badges that will be created... leaderboards... all in good time!

Update 10:43am ET:

For those that want to know, the group blogs update right after the individual xbox blogs.

Things are running behind (Sept 5th)

Hey all, sorry for the delayed post... the jobs are running a bit slow today. They should hopefully finish up this evening. There was an unknown issue with the import that caused the jobs to hang. We cleared out the hang, but we aren't 100% sure that everyone's data is intact. My guess is 99% of you are ok... but for those of you that might have been effected, streaks are off for today.... we will resume streaks tomorrow.

Update Sept 6 2008 10:14pm ET

Things are getting back on track. All the jobs completed yesterday and they seem to be running today with no issues.

Most Popular Blogs for August 2008

Here they are... the most high-traffic blogs of August 2008!

* means comments are turned on, go say hi!

1. the dren *
2. Major Nelson
3. ChangeAgent *
4. Stallion83 *
5. Mightymango *
6. squidpunch *
7. Fshguy *
8. ZeroDesolation *
9. Fatty Chubs *
10. Mr Achievement *
11. Misha LinGhan *
12. PSonic *
13. GiantBombing *
14. StripClubDj
15. porschephiliac *
16. SoupyC *
17. TX Eegras *
18. jcnet *
19. syndelin *
20. Koding *

Looks like the dren is just a machine! I am also surprised to see myself so far up the list. Normally I am down in the middle somewhere... Other than that, pretty much the same cast of characters! You are all pretty well established. Who is going to be the next community all star?