Hey Zune community –

Thanks for taking part in the beta of The Social! I hope you’re having fun and seeing the potential as we continue to grow.

I’m a program manager working on The Social. Basically, that means I, along with a development team, design new features for our web site. For those of you who aren’t familiar with software development, the way it generally works is like this: we get feedback on scenarios from users (whether that’s in these forums, doing research, etc), and then we design/build/test/release new features based on these scenarios. So I’m testing out a new idea: What if we try to develop a feature WITH the community? I mean, our community is the energy that powers zune social, right?

Consider this an invitation to design a feature with me. There are some ground rules, though:

• Any ideas you submit are fair game for us to use (see our Terms of Service, section 8).
• Understand that we’ll read and consider all of your feedback – but the final product may or may not include it. The PM (that’s me!) has final say on what’s in and what’s out.
• You must abide by our Code of Conduct – mostly this means be respectful of others’ ideas.
• I will only be able to share with you details about this one feature; any information pertaining to other features we’re developing is off-limits.

So how will this work? I’ll provide initial concepts and ideas in this forum dedicated to developing the feature, and we’ll go from there. Together, we’ll develop the concept, user scenarios, and then the feature functional design. We’ll still work with our internal product designer to come up with what it actually looks like, and our software developers and testers will write and test the code. But you’ll be seeing it at each step of the software development process.

What do you say? Are you in? Let’s do it!

I’ll post the initial ideas I have on Monday, Feb. 18. In the meantime, feel free to let me know what you think of this concept.

--Jessica

Web site - that's the part I work on, so that's what I can control. :-)

I'm all ears.........

Sounds like a great idea to me. Count me in.