I got into the New Xbox Experience on Friday. The new GUI for 360 goes live for everyone on Wed, but MS let something like 30,000 users in early.

It’s awesome. It is better in everyway, I wouldn’t want to go back to the old blade dashboard. Everything is organized much better, it’s at least twice as fast and it looks really nice. People had a knee jerk reaction to the avatars back at E3, but it’s really in the background. He stands there in front of one section in “My Xbox” and you see them when scrolling through the graphical list of your friends. Right now the only bad part is the very limited selection of clothes. There is not enough choices for the millions of avatars coming next week.

There are bits of new features that are cool.

Ripping full games to the HD is pretty cool. No dvd drive noise and in most cases games load faster. But that gobbles up memory so now I’m looking to get a 120 gig HD for as cheap as I can find.

You can now have the tray close with a game in but not boot up until you tell it too (nice).

The Guide now looks like the old blade dashboard. You can access just about every feature the system does from there, which is fantastic and it’s very fast.

Parties! You and 7 other friends can now voice chat at once. You can all be doing something different, and then say you want to play a game together. Party leader pops the game in and in one button you send out a group invite. Everyone loads up and you can either stay in the party chat or use the voice system in the game you’re playing. Great implementation that beats Sony’s Home to the punch without announcing it 2 years ago and still making users wait.

And the huge one: Netflix On demand integration. Takes about 2 minutes to set up and your Instant queue is right there. Scroll through movie covers, you get all the details of the film right in front of you and in 30 seconds or less, the movie or tv show starts playing. It’s brilliant. Just need a Netflix and XBL Gold membership to get it to work.

Congrats to MS for a job well done. Now the question is, can the network handle the pounding it’s going to get on Wednesday?