Facebook Partners With Microsoft For XBox Integration
Today Microsoft announced a partnership with Facebook to give full integration into XBox live. The announcement involves two new features. The first is an application that you can download to your XBox which will provide you with a robust Facebook experience including photos, videos, friend linking, and access to your stream/news feed. Additionally Facebook Connect will be available to all XBox games, enabling gamers to publish their activity directly to their Facebook feed.
Friend linking is a feature which enables you to invite your Facebook friends to become XBox contacts. It’s a great promotional tool for XBox Live and it’s a great resource for Facebook to continue to expand their social graph to other platforms. This announcement is a pretty big deal for Facebook as there are over 20 million active XBox live users. We spoke with Gareth Davis of Facebook this afternoon who told us about some of the new features.
He mentioned that while you can’t create Facebook relationships with your XBox Live friends, you can pull all of your Facebook friends directly into XBox Live. One thing that I was not quite clear about was whether or not you will be notified of all of your friends who are already XBox live users. Also of interest was the announcement that XBox will enable gamers to post their activities directly to Twitter if they wish. You can also view recent Twitter activity directly within the XBox Live.
The Twitter integration is not for social graph purposes though, it’s simply a Twitter application. XBox had a ton of other announcements today including their new Project Natal which is supposed to help the gaming system compete with the Wii. Thanks to Gizmodo for providing the screenshots. Also, feel free to check out their post which has all the details on Microsoft’s XBox announcements today.
