Xbox 360 Twitter, Facebook clients rated X
No ID? No tweets!
Microsoft has confirmed that children won’t initially be able to access Twitter, Facebook and Last.fm through the Xbox 360, when the social networking duo and online music catalogue launch on the console later this month.
The company announced through its Major Nelson blog that Twitter et al would only be available to gold-level Xbox Live members aged 18 and over in order to “offer an age-appropriate environment for everyone”.
Parents will have the last say over which applications their sprogs can access, though, it seems. Because Microsoft added that its development team is working on an update that will give parents the choice of which social applications kids can access.
The long and short of which will be that Xbox Live members between the ages of 13 and 17 will only be able to use the services if their parents approve know how to define Xbox 360 privacy settings.
A spokesperson for Microsoft told us that Facebook, Twitter and Last.fm will be available on the console “within the next few weeks”. ®
COMMENTS
@Paul Hates Handles
Sounds like you trying to convince yourself that you are non playing games on the "kiddie konsole" as the 360 is known as..
360 is for spotty teenagers.
Wii is for grannies
PS3 is for everyone.
Hmmm
Firstly, MarkOne - You're a tit. Most of the people I know with xboxes are in their thirties. It has a fairly broad demographic already :)
Secondly, sod fapbook and twatter - but I am quite interested in what the addition of LastFM will offer. Streaming audio or even in-game audio based on your LastFM account could be interesting.
@Bernie 2
Thats why you snag yourself a chatpad, mate:
http://www.xbox.com/en-US/hardware/x/xbox360messengerkit/
bleh
Now if they could just extend this policy to Live in general, it might be worth using. The recent rounds of bannings have made things better- but only a bit. It's still lots of giggle 14 year-olds squeaking c*cksucking n*gger and other such gems at each other.
Irritated that I bought a Live subscription in a moment of boredom...
Xbox 300?
(inevitable duplicate post)
Is the Xbox 300 some kind of 360-lite which I haven't heard about?
This is just Microsoft covering its own back, I suppose (and it's not as if they're the first company to take such a stance - see also: Apple's previous Adults-Only rating of dictionary apps). Although from my experience, people fall into one of two camps on this: (1) indignant Mail readers vomiting their disgust about something they're never going to use, or (2) people who just don't care.
Yesterday in Game I saw a kid who must've been about 10 years old, getting his mum to preorder the (18-rated) COD:MW2 for him (which she did), before demanding that she pick it up at tonight's midnight launch. With this sort of thing being rife, it's a wonder that Microsoft even bothers with this sort of initiative.
