Dylan Greene dot com

Do you attend lengthy conference calls that tend to put you to sleep?

Microsoft has created an awesome solution for this: XBOX Live

Now wait, hear me out...

1. Talk for Free. XBOX Live has free full-duplex voice chat. Unlike telephones it's digitally encoded so you have a better quality call and no worries of outsiders listening in. Comparable TelCo conference call plans cost about $5 per hour per person and still aren't going to be digital quality.
2. Free Meeting Rooms. XSNSports.com (XSN stands for XBOX Sports Network) is a web site Microsoft has built for all of their sports games. Here you can set up tournaments, ladders, championships, or in the business world: public and private meetings. There's a public "meeting" called "Road 2 Longhorn" where Longhorn developers and independent software developers meet and talk about the the future of Windows.
3. Have fun at the same time. During the meeting you get to play golf. When you join this "meeting" you are on the same course as everybody else, with the same weather, rules, and other settings, all set up by the meeting host.

With up to 64 people able to join each "meeting," the lure of a golf game to entice people to join and keep them there for the duration of the meeting, it seems like XBOX Live and Links 2004 would be marketing gold. Right? Wrong, it seems....

Well it seems that Microsoft is doing as little as possible to publicize the fact that Links 2004 even has online play:

• No mention of Online Play. Microsoft's Links 2004 home page never mentions playing online, online public and private tournaments, stats tracking or the multitude of other features Links 2004 has. There's no screenshots of online play either, and videos seem to only show cut scenes and not actual game play.
• No mention of significance of XSN Sports. There's a link to "What is XSN Sports" but it doesn't say on the Links page why I should even care enough to click it to find out what it is. The What is? page doesn't really say much either.
• Old videos with no game-play. There's two videos on the site, and like all videos on XBOX.com, they are really really old and don't show what it looks like when you actually play the game.

XSNSports.com, which is the free online network for Microsoft's sports games has issues too:

• The web site is too hard to use. Way too much focus was put on "use Flash to make it cool!" and not enough on "give easy access to what the user needs." I still haven't figured out how to join "Road 2 Longhorn" because the "Join Competition" link brings me a to new page that lists all of the competitions going on, and for whatever reason Road 2 Longhorn no matter what I search for.
• Too many tabs! Tabs are everywhere. Since I can easily scroll the web page with my mouse wheel, why not just make the page longer rather than requiring me to click on each and every tab to see what's changed? On my personal stats page there are 26 tabs!
• Terrible message board. The Message Boards are using message board technology from the Internet stone ages. There's 8,000 messages in the Links Form alone and they are only available as one huge flat list of 15 titles per page. The only way to read them is clicking one title at a time, and each time you do that it reloads and displays this annoying flash animated menu.
• Not enough personalization. Your personal profile doesn't let you give a picture of yourself. Seeing who you are meeting with (and playing against) adds greatly to the overall experience.
• Why require an email address? When you modify your personal profile it requires an email address. Why? Your XBOX Live already has to be associated with a Passport just to view the page. Oh yeah, last one:
• Why require a Passport account? A Passport account is required just to view the pages. Passport should only be needed when trying to join a competition or modify your settings.

Well the potential is there, but the problem is that Microsoft doesn't seem realize the goldmine that they're on and my bet is that full capabilities of XBOX Live are never understood by anybody outside of their Redmond offices.

Maybe XBOX marketing manager and fellow blogger John Porcaro will fill us in?

Here's a review of Link 2004 with a more information and screenshots than you'll find any Microsoft site.

My Gamertag is Dylan.

The concept of using Links 2004 and XBOX Live for online meetings was not my idea. I first read about it on Scoble's blog. Scoble saw it on Newsgator author Greg Reinacker's blog. Greg saw the idea on Microsoft blogger Jeff Sandquist's blog.