Two of the seemingly most popular social networking platforms will be making their way to the Xbox 360 this Fall.  Although I’m not much of a Facebook fan, I can say that I “tweet” quite often on Twitter.  What I realized with these two new additions is that people need to get themselves ready to experience them in the best way possible.  I know most of you are simply planning on waiting for the update and then trying things out but you’ll be behind the curve if you do.  First, a little about each…

Facebook is a social networking site (or hub) that keeps you connected with friends and family.  Think of MySpace but without the MySpace.  You can post pictures, videos, poke people and get involved with a trillion applications.

Twitter is the latest craze and it’s basically a new way to chat.  You post things either signficant or not and hope that people find it interesting enough to follow you and what you have to say.  It’s as simple as that really.

With that said, I wanted to list a few essential steps before the FaceTwit integration this Fall.  I made that word up so if you use “FaceTwit”, I expect you to give me full credit and remind folks where you got it from.  (smile)

Step 1 “Get FaceTwit Profiles & Names”

Why wait if you don’t have them already?  For those of you unaware, Facebook recently decided to ditch the weird character profile it attached to everyone and allow people to choose a name for their profile.  Yeah welcome to the future.  A lot of gaming people quite naturally decided to choose their Gamertags as their profile name.  This will surely make it easier for gaming friends to find you.  If you don’t have a Facebook account, think about what purpose you’ll be using it for before you decide to set your name.  You can not change it once you set it so choose wisely.

Facebook is more personal for me so I chose my real name as my profile name.  Twitter works in a similar fashion but you can alter your profile name as often as you’d like.  You can have your real name, Gamertag or the name you were teased with in elementary school. 

Step 2 “Notifications, Watch ‘Em”

With every new feature, there’s a way to notify your friends and in a perfect world that’s great but in my world that sucks.  If you plan to take advatange of the FaceTwit era on the Xbox 360, then please think wisely about your notifications.  I would rather not know every single moment you’re playing a new game or listening to new music and I’m sure others are just as sensitive about it. 

There are a couple of gaming information sites out there that allow you to adjust the frequency of alerts so I recommend looking into these:

Raptr (games played alerts)
GamerDNA (games played alerts)

Step 3 “Follow Wisely”

For those of you who don’t know, Twitter is centered around a “follow” system.  People can opt to follow your Twitter account and be updated with your tweets.  This means when you update with a post, the people that follow you will see it.  Make sure you follow people that are interesting and people that you don’t mind being updated about.  And make sure that if you solicit people to follow you that they’re aware of your Twitter update habits.

If you’re the type that likes to alert people on everything that you do (see Step 2), then let people know or they’ll just unfollow you anyway.  Letting them know gives them a head’s up; a sort of follower beware.  You can follow me because I don’t subscribe to any spam alerts, I follow back (mostly) and I don’t spam tweets.  My tweets are 92.4% interesting and only 7.5% irrelevant.  The other 1% of my tweets are why you should follow me.

Follow Deacon on Twitter

One of my tweeves (think pet peeves) is people who have thousands of followers but follow very little, if at all.  So again, follow wisely.  Feel free to post your Twitter names in the comments.

Step 4 “Get a Chatpad”

That’s right.  Get a Chatpad (also known as a messenger kit).  This is the last and most critical step of them all because you do not want to be stuck navigating Facebook or tweeting on Twitter with a controller.  The Chatpad is essential.  I’m not recommending a keyboard because of space and convenience.  Who wants to sit there gaming with a clunky keyboard on their lap?  The Chatpad fits right on the bottom of the controller and doesn’t intrude upon your gaming.  You can find them around stores at about $20 – $30.

That’s all folks.  Do these things and your FaceTwit experience this Fall will be a lot better.  Any questions?