Well, Xbox.com and Xbox Live were both down all day for scheduled maintenance. So... what are we looking at? Background downloading? Revised Dashboard? Maybe, just maybe, some pre-E3 goodies laying dormant on our consoles, awaiting the signal from Redmond HQ to activate their super-advanced features?
Nope, it's a message center, adding onto Xbox.com's friends management update last month. The new message center will allow gamers to read messages sent from a console to Xbox.com if you have an Xbox.com only or a Silver account, both ways with a Gold account, but only up to 200 messages per day...that's 200 if they're on your friends list but 25 if they're not.
Yeah, we know, it's a little confusing. Lucky for us, someone at Microsoft anticipated our dilemma and created a lovely chart to keep it all in order for us. Lucky for you, we're willing to decipher it for you: pony up for a Gold Xbox Live account or this feature won't do you much good.
Major Nelson has added some shots of the new services to his Flickr stream. Check em out, if you're into checking out steamy shots of software interfaces, like we are.
[Thanks everyone that sent this in]
