Twitter, Facebook heading to Xbox Live

By Caroline McCarthy on 02 June 2009, 11:48am

It might not be as hotly anticipated as the The Beatles: Rock Band game, but Microsoft announced at its annual E3 press briefing that Facebook and Twitter will be coming to the Xbox Live service.

The press event included short demonstrations of what are effectively Facebook and Twitter clients for the gaming console, aesthetically adapted to the Xbox Live interface.

With the Facebook app, which will be a download from Xbox Live, members will be able to engage in a limited number of features, including photo browsing, status updates and looking at friends' profile 'streams'.

More important to game developers is the fact that the Facebook Connect standard, which was rolled out first to Web developers and then to iPhone developers, is coming to the Xbox this autumn. This means that players will be able to log in with their Facebook accounts and broadcast their gaming activities on their social-network profiles.

Xbox manufacturer Microsoft made a $240m (£146m) investment in Facebook in October 2007. Facebook now has well over 200 million active users around the world.

Both Facebook products are pencilled in for autumn, according to Facebook platform program manager Gareth Davis. He said there are currently no plans to bring Facebook's prospective virtual currency to the Xbox, but implied that it's not out of the question. "We're constantly looking at ways of improving the user experience or the developer experience with Facebook credits," Davis said.