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First Look At The New Xbox Live: Top 5 Improvements In This Falls Dashboard Update

This Fall, the Xbox Live experience will evolve once more. Past dashboard updates have brought us features like Netflix, Hulu, Sky Player, Facebook, ESPN and customizable avatars. So what’s new this time? Here are some of the coming changes in this fall’s update.

The new Xbox Live is very different from the current design. The channels are gone, replaced by a look similar to that of the Windows Phone interface. The update is much cleaner, showing fewer items on screen while still clearly presenting the options that users can navigate to. Plus, the new dashboard can be interacted with using Kinect’s motion and voice commands, so having to switch back and forth between the main controller-directed areas and the specific Kinect areas will soon be a thing of the past.

Microsoft is also attempting to improve the speed and performance of the menus. with no hitches or hiccups – menus, videos and audio will pop up quickly and navigation is going to be more responsive when using Kinect. unlike the video or audio clips on the current interface.

The Xbox Live team plans on further integrating social networks such as Facebook (and presumably Twitter) into the core gaming experience. One intriguing new idea is beacons. A beacon allows players to broadcast to friends that they want to play a specific game. These broadcasts can be sent through Xbox Live or Facebook, and will feature custom messages that can be attached to the beacon, making it easy for friends and other gamers to get organized and play multiplayer games together online.

Another social media feature mentioned was the ability to automatically post the Achievements that you unlock to Facebook. Now, that may sound like the biggest source of spam to hit your news feed since Farmville, but rest assured it will come with an option to filter out the insignificant Achievements. For example, your friends will only see that you finished Gears of War 3 on insane difficulty, not that you just finished the tutorial.

Xbox is partnering with search engine Bing (they’re both Microsoft products, after all) to streamline the way that consumers find media through their consoles. With a Kinect handy, simply saying, “Xbox, Bing Batman” – the new search technology will pull up any relevant results, from separate sources, and put them on the screen. This includes movies, games, music, Netflix, Hulu and Sky Player results, all related to Batman. Users save time not only by avoiding the exercise of chicken pecking out the search query on the controller keyboard or the joystick, but also by reducing the number of places needed to look. If The Dark Knight isn’t available on Netflix, but is available on Zune Movies, you’ll know instantly.

Microsoft will be adding more and more new features, partners, and content to its Xbox Live service well into 2012, helping to solidify the Xbox 360 as a center of entertainment for the home. Although the developers aren’t give any specific names, they promised they will be revealing their partnerships with TV cable operators in the near future, and that the services that come out of those partnerships will have features unique to Xbox 360 and its social features built-in. Using voice commands to find TV content in the new search engine and joining friends, chatting, or leaving comments as they watch their favorite TV shows, sports or movies are just two improvements coming. Cloud storage and roaming profiles are also definite possibilities for the future, but Microsoft representatives say that they are saving those details for a later time.