Xbox Live will be offline, and you won't even be able to bitch about it because the official Xbox forums will be down as well. Be-masked Xbox spokesperson Major Nelson confirms that there will be no updates whatsoever to the service, especially not the Xbox Experience update due this fall, so quit bugging him about it. Zune, for its part, will lose Zune Social, the Zune Marketplace and the Zune.net forums, again with absolutely no new features when the service is back up and running. So, commenters, how are you going to deal with what I've just decided to name the Great Microsoft Service Outage of 2008? Read a book? Go to work? Not care because you've never even seen a Zune in real life? [Xbox Live's Major Nelson and Zune Insider]

Sending messages, browsing other people's music history, and listening to 30 second samples are super easy to do. If you've got a Zune Pass subscription, you can pretty much go nuts looking at other people's songs and downloading them directly to your player in a sort of crazy music buffet. The most interesting thing we found is that both "Zune" and "Microsoft" are restricted words. You can't have them as your "status" message if you wanted to say "Testing out the Zune." All in all, it's a pretty good start (the site's still in beta) to the internet social aspect of the Zune that Microsoft is trying to expand on. [Zune]