A few days ago, Microsoft took the entire Xbox LIVE Service down for around 24 hours to complete scheduled maintenance and perform upgrades. Sounds innocent enough, but for a paid service like LIVE, I'm finding it more and more difficult to accept these scheduled downtimes. Xbox LIVE is no longer a niche service for hardcore gamers to frag each other in HALO 2. Today it's the backbone to an entertainment experience that families, moms, dads, and kids rely on.

Now, I'm a reasonable guy. I understand that systems like LIVE, which are always being pushed to their limit, need maintenance, patches, and expansions. However, Microsoft's approach needs to change; they need to ensure a basic level of service for all their paid customers.

What do they need to do exactly?

1. Tell Users Xbox LIVE is Down for Maintenance on Their Console

I'm not even sure why I have to suggest this. On Tuesday I attempted to connect to the LIVE service, and of course, it failed. My Xbox told me I have a problem with my Internet connection, apparently my router or the gateway has an incorrect MTU setting. I know that's not true, but I did waste 10-15 minutes resetting network extension kits, rebooting my router, rebooting the 360, and various other troubleshooting steps. When nothing worked I finally went to Major Nelson's blog and learned that Live was down for maintenance. 

My problem... lot's of people who use LIVE don't religiously read Major Nelson's blog. LIVE customers like me should be told Xbox LIVE is down for maintenance when we attempt to connect to the service through our console, not that we have Internet connection problems. Microsoft shouldn't waste our time suggesting we investigate problems that don't exist.

2. Other Paid Services, Like Netflix, Should Continue to Work

In fact, that was the primary reason I was firing up my 360. Since my first child was born, I get very little opportunity to watch TV, and wanted to kill my free hour watching something from Netflix. Oh that's right, I can't access and stream Netflix content without a connection to LIVE.

For starters, why Microsoft insists on Gold level memberships to access Netflix is beyond me. I can live with it though since I also subscribe for other reasons, but if MS wants money for me to watch content that doesn't even come from them, their service shouldn't stand in the way of me doing so. 

3. Content Purchased through Xbox LIVE should always work

Several others in the LIVE community feel this way, as highlighted by this comment from Andrew over at the LIVE Operations blog. "it's pretty ***** when you can't play videos you've downloaded or even xbox arcade titles because the certificate is hosted on the xbox live servers, this is stuff i've paid for and i can't even play it without being online???"

I agree with Andrew. Certificate servers should never be inaccessible. There's simply no excuse to deny users access to previously paid content. Multiplayer experiences are an exception to this rule, but I should never be denied the option to play a paid Xbox LIVE Arcade game or view a video.

There it is... the basic level of service.

Those are my three basic suggestions/expectations I expect Xbox LIVE to fulfill 100% of the time; a 'basic' level of service. The rest of it (friend lists, chat, multiplayer gaming, marketplace, downloads, etc), though inconvenient, is acceptable to have offline for periods of time for upgrades or maintenance... at least in my opinion.

What basic expectations do you have? Post your comments below.

Spam. It's the e-mail you don't want, but is sent to you anyway. In fact, Spam has been around since before the Internet and e-mail became mainstream. They even celebrated the 30th birthday of the first known Spam message last year.

I've been able to watch the evolution of Spam fighting techniques over the years, and while I understand the need for inbox protection from nefarious spammers, I'm fed up with the laziness of e-mail users. 

More and more I find myself being challenged to send someone an e-mail. I fire off an e-mail, and you send be back something automated that makes click through to a website and pass a Captcha (the box with a picture of letters, words or numbers that look scrambled where you have to recognize it and enter it into a box), fill out a form, or reply to some automated e-mail by sending you another e-mail.

The latter I find hilarious I have to send two e-mails to get one through? Actually, what I really want to do is have my spam filter send a challenge to their spam filter to prove that it's a real spam filter before my spam filter lets me see their challenge.

Well, I've had it. No longer should we all be punished for trying to send someone a legit e-mail. I will no longer jump through hoops, and I will no longer be your personal junk mail filter. so enjoy this new tech law:

Matt's Tech Law #4 - NEVER use a friend, family member, relative, or other human being as a spam protection device. Always opt for a spam protection system that does not punish legitimate senders, or maintain an account for personal use that does not rely on this type of system. 

Matt's Tech Law #4, Section A: E-mail senders should ALWAYS ignore any automated e-mail challenge when sending a legitimate e-mail.

So the next time you get one of these automated challenge e-mails, join me by sending a different kind of message to these lazy folks and NEVER respond to it. If they ask why you didn't send them that e-mail they asked for, tell them you've got better things to do than be their junk mail filter and to check out Matt's Tech Law #4. Together we can create a world where everyone deals with their own spam.

Yep. You read that right. I know, everywhere else you're reading that Firefox is soooo much better, and that people are switching to it in droves. For me that was three years ago, but now I'm going back.

I'll admit that I don't rag on Microsoft anywhere near as much as other people do. I just don't hate them merely because they're big and control the majority marketshare of desktop and notebooks PCs worldwide, nor do I despise them because Mac people say I should.

That doesn't mean I "love" everything Microsoft does or every product they make. For example, one thing I idn't like was Internet Explorer, which (at the time I originally switched to Firefox) had stagnated at version 6 for quite some time. And I didn't look back... even when Microsoft (finally) added things like tabbed browsing in IE 7. I was happy with Firefox, and though I've used IE for various things over the past few years, it's never been my browser of choice... until today.

I'm doing something I never thought I'd do.... I'm switching back to Internet Explorer. More specifically, Internet Explorer 8.

I'm doing it for one reason, crash recovery. Not 30 minutes ago I lost about 2.5 hours of work because another tab I had open crashed, and as is the case with Firefox, means everything goes down. 

I know, I know. "Yada yada, save your work. Yada, yada it's my fault." Fine, I should have saved what I was doing when I had to switch over to that other tab and attend to something else. You're right, I probably should have had less tabs open. I get it. Still, why on earth does one tab have to bring down every other thing I have open? Why can't I close and restart a single tab?

It looks like Microsoft heard this one before, because a new part of Internet Explorer 8 is a new approach to crash recovery. Most importantly (to me anyway), is that IE 8 supposedly runs tabs in their own process (or tries to depending on your system's performance). This means that if a tab crashes in IE8, it shouldn't affect every other tab open. 

I'll even be the first to admit that this isn't a 'mission critical' feature for basic web surfing; it's not like you can't navigate back to whatever page you were looking at. However, anyone that is writing on the web (and since it seems like everyone has a blog these days, so that's quite a lot of people), it sure sucks when your post is lost because you loaded up a funny video in another tab.

So, if it works like they claim, I won't be going back to Firefox... at least until they can match this one feature. Who knows, maybe not even then. I tend to stick with whatever is working, even if it has some things that annoy me.

If it doesn't work, then back to Firefox I go, because at least it doesn't make that annoying click sound every time I hit a link. 

(Expect my next blog entry to be "Things about IE that still drive me crazy.")