Have you heard about the new Twitter.com? The revised site offers embedded media, infinite scroll, and a host of new user experience enhancements. World-wide roll-out begins today, but depending on where exactly you are, it could take several weeks for the new features to reach you.

One of the biggest changes facing Twitter.com users is the different layout, which in my opinion, resembles the new iPad native Twitter app. Your @mentions, retweets, searches, and lists sits directly above your timeline now, creating an easy way to switch your view depending on what you’re interested in seeing. On the right, the default starting panel will show you recent followers, who you’re following, along with recent trending topics and suggestions on who to follow.

Clicking a specific tweet causes a panel to slide out to the right, showing you that user’s recent tweets and if they’ve embedded some media with their tweet, you can see a larger version of that as well. If the tweet was geo-tagged, the right-hand panel will display the location on a map. Twitter is offering an easy way to embed both photos and video directly in your tweets, which will be visible within other user’s timelines or visible upon clicking a tweet containing embedded media.

With partnerships with the likes of Vimeo, YouTube, twitpic, Flickr and others, embedding will be easy and seamless. One of the coolest examples of this new feature is sharing a link to an entire Flickr set of pictures. When you do, those who follow will be able to see a bunch of little thumbnails in their right pane. And near the bottom of this pane, a slideshow for the pictures is also automatically created. Very slick indeed.

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As an Android powered smartphone user, I’m aware that the best and/or most polished version of most applications usually exist for Apple’s iPhone first. Even though Android is gaining market share among smartphones (and may even eclipse the iPhone), developers concentrate a great deal of time and effort on making apps for Apple’s devices.

However, that doesn’t mean Android apps are completely forgotten. They do get made, made well and many are frequently updated. Case in point is the Facebook app for Android. Last night the app was updated to bring it more inline with its iPhone counterpart.

The update offers quite a few minor fixes as well as several major ones to the app’s homescreen. Some of the changes and improvements include:

• Post a status update or search for friends with just one click.

• New photo reel that enables easy viewing of photos and videos from friends in your News Feed.

• Draggable Notifications drawer where you can easily see if a friend posted a note on your wall, commented or liked a post or tagged you in a photo.

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Way back in October of 2009 I wrote an article entitled “Is Twitter the New Film Critic?“  I now know the answer to that question is “yes.” My theory was that with so many people talking about movies on Twitter it may be possible to assess the success or failure of a film based on film-goers opinions. Twitter commentary could feasibly act as a barometer for new releases and be the best movie critic to date.

I’m kicking myself for not acting on that idea because now someone beat me to the punch. TechCrunch brings word of a new site called fflick; a movie “review” site that taps into Twitter and determines how well films are trending on the social site by analyzing how often the film is mentioned:

“…you’ll find the Positive and Negative tweets, which display a list of tweets that the site has automatically categorized using its sentiment engine. After looking through a handful of movies, I found that the system was pretty good at identifying both negative and positive tweets, though there were occasionally some tweets that were only mentioning a film in passing or were mis-categorized.”

Having gone through some of the current film ratings myself on fflick I have to say the site reflected what I would consider to be the true sentiment regarding a particular film.  The way in which this process works is not unlike movie review site Rotten Tomatoes.

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SVGNGR is a new mobile application that allows you to complete challenges at different places you check into. Think of it as FourSquare, with a kick. From an official press release:

Playing SCVNGR is simple. It’s a game all about going places, doing challenges and earning points. Challenges are quick, casual, fun things to do at places. Building on SCVNGR is just as simple. Everyone who plays SCVNGR can also build SCVNGR by adding challenges to their favorite locations.

Eat, Pray, Love follows the journeys of Liz Gilbert (played by Julia Roberts), who travels to Italy, India and Bali on a journey of self discovery. Columbia Pictures has announced that they are teaming up with SVGNGR to bring you the feel of these exotic locales right from your phone.

Twenty six cities across the US have been selected and identified with Eat, Pray, Love locations. Players can compete in movie based challenges and earn badges.  To learn more, visit  the official website for this Eat, Pray, Love partnership, letyourselfgo.com/svgngr

SCVNGR is available for the iPhone and for the Android.  Eat, Pray, Love will be released in theaters on August 13.

Spend a lot of time on social networks like Facebook? Well then, this movie is for you. The Social Network, directed by David Fincher and written by Aaron Sorkin, tells the story of the founding of the most popular social network around, Facebook, and we’ve got the first teaser for the film to share with you today.

Like many teasers this one doesn’t give much away except that the film will take a look at the darker side of Facebook’s creation and follow its founder Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) and president Sen Parker (Justin Timberlake) as they create the site just six short years ago and see it grow into the juggernaut it is today.

The trailer, courtesy of Mashable, gives us at least something to work with, though it’s really only lines of dialogue. However, the tagline (also seen in the poster) of “You don’t get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies” should also be telling in that this film probably won’t gloss over the troubles, both internal and external, that inevitably plague an undertaking as huge as Facebook.

Check out the teaser after the jump. The Social Network hits theaters on October 1st.

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Given the storm of bad press and user revolts Facebook has been suffering since announcing their “Open Graph” feature to better spread its data across the web, it’s rather puzzling that the company would announce an unrelated new security feature. But, announce it they did. With well-known tech pundit and podcaster Leo Laporte deleting his Facebook account on-the-air, Facebook has announced a new security method that ties your account to certain known computers and devices.

Similar to a method already in-use by most U.S. banking entities, Facebook will recognize computers and devices you typically log-in with, however when an unknown device attempts to log-in, you will be required to answer a challenge-response question to verify your identity. Facebook users will be able to approve which computers and mobile devices are allowed to log-in, and when an unauthorized attempt occurs, an email or text message will alert the user of the unauthorized access attempt.

While this heightened security is certainly unique in the social networking world, it does nothing to address the serious privacy issues being expressed about how Facebook data is being extended and used by unknown and potentially untrustworthy third-party web sites. Even Congress is getting involved, with four Democratic senators calling on Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to reconsider the recent changes in its privacy settings and asking the Federal Trade Commission to streamline guidelines regarding privacy on all social networks.

After the jump, I describe how to activate Facebook’s new authorized device/log-in notification feature, so read on if you’d like to try it for yourself.

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Facebook's "Open Graph" Concept

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a series of updates integral to their next-gen Facebook Platform today at their third annual f8 conference held in San Francisco. At the heart of these updates is the technology to allow Facebook data to flow more easily outside the carefully-controlled confines of Facebook itself.

Building on the success and widespread adoption of Facebook Connect, first announced at the inaugural f8 in 2008, a new concept dubbed “Open Graph” will expose your Facebook connections and public data to third-party web sites and mobile apps. In doing so, these outside services can better personalize your experience based on the data it finds. Expect the data to flow in two directions as services like Pandora, Yelp, Foursquare and other connected services feed even more behavioral data into your personal Open Graph.

You can easily imagine a scenario wherein after analyzing your Foursquare check-ins, Yelp decides that you really have a thing for Thai food and helpfully displays all of the Thai Restaurants in your immediate area upon start-up. Or perhaps you’ve favorited so many female singer-songwriter tracks at your favorite music-streaming service, that Yelp notifies you that Sara Barailles is playing at the Hotel Cafe nearby in Los Angeles this evening.

If you’re anything like me, you’re probably marveling at the glorious levels of personalization you might experience while simultaneously cringing at the potential privacy issues that Open Graph may unleash on unsuspecting users. But wait, there’s more!

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