facebook_xbox_360At this year’s E3 Conference it was announced that the Twitter, Facebook and Last.fm services would be added to the dashboards of nearly 17 million Xbox Live subscribers.

Whilst recent dashboard updates have helped to pave the way for these new features, it was revealed yesterday (in a Microsoft interview with MTV) that the beta release for these features will drop “middle-towards-end of October.”

The full extent of these features is not yet known, although it has been suggested that Xbox Live users will be able to browse and cross-link their Facebook friends from the comfort of their dashboard.

Twitter, however, isn’t as new to gaming as you might expect. Uncharted 2, a popular PS3 game, recently launched with the option to send Twitter updates as players progressed through the game, joined multiplayer matches and earned trophies. This was met with a wave of scepticism and the game creators Naughty Dog pulled the functionality completely after users complained of the inevitable Twitter spam.

Whether we see an increase of in-game tweeting, shouts of “n00b” from a random 13 year old or complaints from people trying to type out 140 character messages with their control pads remains to be seen.

The new social features will only be available to a select number of beta testers initially, with a public release date yet to be confirmed.