Late last week Xbox Live manager Marc Whitten announced there will be no Spring dashboard update this year. Instead, the team plans to focus their resources on boosting Live’s infrastructure, hopefully remedying some of the stability issues that have crept up in the last few months. Of course, most Xbox fanboys were severely disappointed by this news, especially given the enticing rumors of soon-to-be implemented features posted over a week ago. Sure, I’m a bit disappointed too, but it’s not exactly the end of the world. Why? Well, I guess I’m quite content with the dashboard’s current state. Let’s face it. It still blows away the competition. And the free Indiana Jones theme looks sweet!

Still, I wouldn’t mind seeing some greater functionality in the future. At the top of my list would be an option to install a game to the console’s hard disk drive; this was one of the rumored updates. The PS3 has offered this option on several titles (including GTA IV) allowing for quicker load times. This would be great in games like Dead Rising or Assassin’s Creed where the action frequently comes to an abrupt halt while new areas are loaded. I’d also like to see a more elaborate friend list system. Currently, I have lots of friends in my list, many of whom I haven’t played with in over a year. But I’m not quite ready to ditch them either. It would be cool if you could sort your friends into different groups. Some sort of clan tab would be useful too, so you can see when other members are online without adding dozens of people to your friend list.

I’d be shocked if the Xbox Live team hasn’t already taken these ideas into consideration. And maybe at some point we’ll see them implemented…maybe in the Fall? But for now we’ve got our good ol’ dashboard for the Summer. And that’ll be just fine for me.