HUGE UPDATE COMING FOR XBOX'S MY XBOX

In the coming days, the familiar “My Xbox” section of Xbox.com is going away. Fear not: It’s being replaced with a significant update that will make it even easier to see what your friends are doing on Xbox LIVE. My Xbox is being superceded by the new “Social” section, which not only lets you see at a glance what your friends are up to, but also gives you early access to one of the coolest features coming in the next Xbox 360 dashboard update. That’s right: Xbox.com users will be the very first to try the new Beacons feature, which lets you mark games you want to play with others, making it easier to find friends who want to play the same games.

Other site enhancements are on the way, including the ability to search the Zune video catalog and buy/rent movies and TV shows right from your browser.

GOOGLE UPDATES SOCIAL SEARCH DATA WITH TWITTER, YOUTUBE AND FACEBOOK INFO

Google first rolled out their Social Search feature back in 2009, but they’ve just announced a substantial update that will more fully integrate your social search results into normal search results. Now when you view a search results page, your search results will be annotated if they have been shared or liked by your friends… and your search results will even be directly influenced now by how many of your friends have shared and linked a given page.

This is very different than the way Google Social Search used to work: back in 2009 when they service first launched, social results were placed down at the bottom of the page and mainly showed results friends had shared and linked through their Google profiles, a la Google Reader.

Now, however, Google’s plucking their social search data from a bigger ecosystem that includes Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. If someone you’re connected to on any of these sites has shared a link, that link may now show up higher in your results, with an annotation made by that person showing up right beneath the results.

“With these changes, we want to help you find the most relevant information possible, personalized to your interests and the people you care about,” says Google.

The new update will begin rolling out to users today, although it’ll start just in Google’s English results, and it might take a week for you to start seeing your friends’ social sharing habits popping up in your search results.

Needless to say, the new Social Search will only work if Google knows who you are by searching after you’ve logged into your Google account.

RUMOR: FACEBOOK LAUNCHING COMMENTING SYSTEM FOR OTHER WEBSITES

According to a report filed by CNET, social networking giant Facebook is “planning to launch a third-party commenting system in a matter of weeks.” The article cites “multiple sources familiar with the matter” and offers the recent hiring of both Nick Grudin and Andy Mitchell as additional evidence. While Facebook is already heavily integrated into the commenting systems of most major blogs, via Facebook Connect, it is not directly responsible for most commenting systems. ”[The] Facebook commenting product may also permit users to log in with Google, Yahoo, or Twitter IDs if a publisher chooses to incorporate them,” writes a CNET source. The move does, in our opinion, make sense for the social networking site. Aside from padding its user base with those who sign-up just to comment, it would also allow it to build a more in-depth profile of its users by tracking what they are reading and inclined to comment on while online. [BGR]

"GOOGLE ME" SOCIAL NET PLANNED

Google CEO Eric Schmidt revealed at Tuesday's Google Zeitgeist their plan for "Google Me".  Google Me is the internal name for an initiative to bring social networking functions to all of Google's services like YouTube and Gmail.

Some of the planned features are alerts on YouTube when friends view their videos, playing social networking games and accessing data from places like Twitter and Flickr. [Ars Technica]

WEBSITE FOR "THE SOCIAL NETWORK" GOES LIVE

The offiicial website for the movie "The Social Network" has launched.  The movie hits theaters October 1st.

"The Social Network" takes a look at the youngest billionaire in history, Jeff Zuckerberg, creator of Facebook and the personal and legal complications his success has brought him.  It stars Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Rooney Mara, Brenda Song, Max Minghella and Justin Timberlake.