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Facebook, Twitter On Xbox 360 November 17

Tom Ivan's picture

By Tom Ivan

November 15, 2009

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Social networking sites Facebook and Twitter are to be made publicly available on Xbox 360 on November 17, Microsoft has confirmed.

The features will be free to Xbox Live Gold subscribers but won't be accessibe to those under the age of 18.

On the same day Microsoft will introduce music streaming to Xbox 360 via Last.fm radio, which plays home to over 3.5 million songs, and Zune Video, which will update the platform holder's movie library to 1080p and offer films “instantly” via streaming. Both services were announced at E3 in June.



“We’re delivering some truly exciting social entertainment experiences to our members,” said Marc Whitten, general manager of Xbox Live. “Xbox Live’s differentiator has always been our community, and we’ve already seen a tremendous response to these features in our public preview.”

Facebook is also expected to be confirmed for Sony’s PS3 after a series of images briefly appeared on the official PlayStation website showing XMB access to the social networking site. Sony told CVG that it'll “have more info on this very shortly".

Mystakill's picture
On November 20th Mystakill said:

Both implementations of Facebook (and other apps on 360) are half-assed. 360's Facebook (and Twitter and last.fm) are individual apps, which require you to exit whatever game you're playing to interact with. PS3's Facebook app is limited to posting games you've purchased (why?), awarded trophies, and current game status; the first is pure marketing and the latter are somewhat pointless.

The 360 app is definitely the better of the two, as it provides most of the regular functions of Facebook. The PS3 "integration" is marketing gone awry.

All of the 360's apps should have been integrated into the dashboard, making them much more useful than they currently are. Last.fm streaming while in-game would have been ideal. Twitter updates would be similar to PS3's posting of trophies and game status.

I don't foresee anyone using these very much after an initial run-through to check them out. I've already turned off all of the Facebook posts on my PS3, and I'll ignore the apps on my 360. Also, whose bright idea was it to limit those apps to Gold subscribers? All of those services are available for free on every other platform. If I really wanted to, I could fire up the PS3's browser and use them natively.

So remind me again why I should care about these "integrated" apps?