I've been working on a new feature for the 360 community, cleaning up the gamercard page so it's more...well, awesome. For the past few weeks I've been playing around with the page, which, I've had some really positive feedback from the handful of members I've shown it to, and I've come to notice a few things.

Avatars

They're pure awesome. I just keep clicking around on different people because they have the most amusing avatars. Some people I've never even heard of before but just clicking around on avatars is pretty amusing.

However, I do see that a lot of people don't have one yet. I highly suggest you jump on over to your 360 and make one. Albeit, I'm not 100% sure if you need a Gold account or if you can do all of this with just the free Silver account. If someone could confirm this that would be great.

Achievements

There are a LOT of achievements and Neoseeker members have an amazing amount of them. To give out a rough estimate, the last time I checked there were about 1.4 million achievements obtained by a very large amount of users here on Neo, and, I wasn't even done getting everyones information, there were still about 400 people to go.

Some developers really cheap out on achievement art. For example, Ubisoft and Prince of Persia. Every single achievement in PoP has this icon:

seriously? that's it? for 60 achievements you couldn't come up with any variety, Ubi?

Secret Achievements

They suck. Why make it a secret? I don't get the point. OHHH NOES IT'S A SEACARET. It's just a huge pain in the ass.

Xbox.com

Unfortunately I can't stand their site. It's very obtrusive and finding what you want isn't the easiest thing to do. For instance, if you wanted to look at your own games and achievements how do you do it? ¯\(o_O)/¯ dunno. What I have to do is compare against someone else and then manipulate the URL and change it to myself.

Also, what's so secret? why hide things? It makes no sense to me why you have to log in to see anyones games or achievements. It just makes the entire experience more frustrating. However, I must say that Xbox.com is far superior than Sony's site for the PS3. I swear Sony hired some fresh University grad student to make the site. It is completely impractical and is excessively "web 2.0"

APIs

During this entire project I had the chance to talk to ever so popular in the community, Major Nelson via the goodness that is, Twitter. Long long ago MS had a program called the Xbox Community Developers Program (XCDP) and only a certain amount of API keys were given out. With the API key you gain access to their RESTful API to get data on a user. Since then they've shut down the program to all new applicants (ie: me) so after explaining the situation with Major Nelson he passed along my info to the 'appropriate people'

quote major nelson

I have forwarded this on to the team that handles requests.

who are in charge of giving out keys now. This was 9 days ago and I haven't had a response yet from the 'team' so lets hope I hear back soon. I have my fingers crossed.

On the other side of the pond, Sony has absolutely nothing in terms of an API, I say, booooo to you Sony. I really think that if they did release an API that was available to anyone, or, even if they just openly took requests it would significantly increase exposure, and popularity to the PS3 whole 'trophy' thing. I still think trophies are retarded though.

Fake Gamertags

I know who you are, I've found you all so watch out because you're so called gamertags will be wiped out! :P I have a method in which I can validate a gamertag so in the future once this feature is launched you'll no longer be able to put in a gamertag here unless it's actually legitimate. They (MS) don't tell you but I also figured out a legit gamertag consists of,

• Max of 15 characters
• Can only contain letters, numbers, spaces
• Cannot start with a number

Suggestions

If you have any suggestions on what you'd like to be able to do which you cannot on Xbox.com let me know, post a comment.