Zune, 'Z2K9', and Twitter

01/02/2009 09:27 AM by Chris Toohey

Alan had me ntioned the other day how more and more businesses are leveraging social networks -- specificallyTwitter -- to stay in touch with their customers as well as finding potential customers and new opportunities in the cloud.

On New Year's Eve, I'm watching the 11PM news with my family (which cut into Dick Clark's show), when we see a report of Zune owners complaining that their devices locked up/froze from ~2AM that morning. Being a Zune owner, you can imagine my dismay. See... I literally use my Zune every day - when I'd doing the dishes, washing the dog, coding like a madman, etc. for both music but mostly for podcasts. I was thus shocked when my Zune 30 (the 30GB Zune, to which I'm only using ~4GB to this day) attempted to boot but froze at 100%.

Thinking to myself "Meh - MS will without a doubt fix this, I'm getting back to my family to ring in the new year!", I decided to take another 2 seconds and tweet the news that I, too, had joined the Z2K9 social.

Immediately, I had received the following response from microsoft_cares:

... and it worked. I didn't have to think about having to listen to my podcasts and music library from my laptop or having to go out and buy a Zune 8. I was able to relax, knowing that everything was going to be just fine, and my Zune would be back to work for me the next time I would use it.

And, for the record, it was actually pretty cool being a part of such a worldwide event. Sounds stupid, I know, but as luck would have it (and the reason I didn't know this until 11-something PM that evening), I didn't touch the Zune over either of the holidays, so it was an uneventful outage for me, and something that I could sit back and smile about now.

I did wonder however, while checking out a picture of my younger brother on Facebook today, if I was alone in that regard. In the picture, you can clearly see one of his friends using her iPod for the background soundtrack to the party. For the more social Zune users out there who had the same plans, that must have sucked...