A few weeks ago, Microsoft announced that it was going to allow beta for the series of new features that will be coming to all 360s sometime in November. I was actually really excited about this because I'm a huge fan of Twitter, and I'm on the site daily. I was also enthused, although not quite as much, about the ability to browse facebook on the console. I have a facebook, although I don't use it as much as most other people. And the last part of the update, the Last.fm section, I wasn't interested in at all, because for some reason I was under the impression that you would have to pay for the service. 
 
Anyway, so I booted up my 360 after the update and hopped on twitter, a pretty easy process. You just input your username/password and you're in basically. The twitter hub on the console is alright I guess, It's nothing special and it's not exactly easy to maneuver through it using a controller, it's kind've irritating. I'd imagine that I won't be using it very often, as it's much easier to just hop on the nearest PC. It's REALLY stupid to try to type out a whole tweet using the controller if you dont have the keyboard addon for the 360 controller, it actually gave me a headache after only a few tweets. 
 
Next, I decided to try out facebook, (which you must download a small file in order to use, its something like 26 MB or something). The facebook hub is fine I suppose, It'll be nice for pictures, etc because it allows a fullscrean slideshow of photos on your television. The actual browsing of the site, works like you'd expect, nothing really grand, but it's not too bad. Once again, the only problem comes when you actually need to TYPE something, it fails terribly... 
 
Lastly, the most impressive part of the package is Last.fm. It's kind've hard to explain what last.fm is, but basically it allows you to stream music from your 360, ANY music that is on Last.fm's database. It has an interesting feature where you put in an artist name and it compiles an entire 'radio' station comprised of that artist's music AND music that sounds similar. This is incredibly useful for discovering new music. And once you have listened to enough music, Last.fm will begin making suggestions of what music/bands/stations you might also enjoy which is pretty nifty. I have a feeling that this feature is going to keep my 360 on basically 24/7 and will probably end up causing me to have the RROD... but oh well, its worth it.