On Monday, the Zune team warned its users that there would be scheduled maintenance happening for Zune.net and the Zune Marketplace, bringing down the services as work was done to both the back-end and front-end. Less than 48 hours later, both were put back up, and the improvements have been revealed. Zune.net now features a large catalog of streaming audio podcasts (powered by Silverlight, of course) and the ability to browse the entire podcast catalog. This can all be done from your browser (no need to connect to the Zune Marketplace) over at social.zune.net/podcasts. In addition, the ability to create quizzes and share them with your friends (artists listed as answers will be linked to artist pages for "research" purposes) has been added; check out this blog post from Zune Insider for more details.
Zune Insider also noted that not everything has gone perfectly: "You may continue to see some leftovers of the update last night like delayed playcount data. This data is not being lost, it just may take a little longer to display. Thanks again for all your patience. The work we did on the backend will help the Zune service continue to grow and scale." Furthermore, the latest Zune discussions in the forums can now be subscribed to via a topic-based RSS feed.
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