Zune Thoughts - Daily News, Views, Rants and Raves

Jessica Zahn, Zune Social program manager and all-around cool gal, has been enlisting help with a new feature for the Social, a sort-of trivia game that will combine personal quizzes with music knowledge. This has been on the books for a while, but recently Jessica (Ztag: Jetherealz) has started getting serious, dropping a ton of specs and proposed features. Additionally, she's been enlisting help from the Community—that's right, capitalized—to design and skin the site. Ryan (Ztag: Volvoshine) alerted us to a mockup he's currently working on over at Zune-Scene that looks pretty cool so far. If you want to get involved, visit the Zune.net forums, and make your voice heard.

The Zune Card is undoubtedly cool. You can set your own profile and background picture, in addition to selecting a custom status to describe how you're currently feeling (as if your last five played songs weren't enough of an indicator). Unfortunately, there are a few "no-no" words you can't put in your status. Most of them are fairly obvious (the "_-word", certain bodily parts and functions, and things like "Microsoft" and "Support"), but a few of them seem to be going a bit over the top. For instance, if I'm listening to to Jerry Lee Lewis' famous "Great Balls of Fire", it won't allow me to say so. I can't even say "I love my Zune!" without it throwing up a hissy-fit. It's interesting, because it recognizes some substitute letters but not others (e.g. $ for s, \/ for v, 1 for l, or * as substitute for any letter).

It's interesting to note that while "Xbox" and "Windows" are blocked (though not "XP" or "Vista"), "PlayStation", "Apple", "OSX", or even "iPod" are not. The only non-Microsoft trademark they block? "Linux."