It's official. This week, Xbox 360 owners who fire up their consoles will be greeted to a mandatory dashboard update. You've heard the rumblings before, but now it's true ... the Xbox 360 has gone social.

The update, pushed through to users by Microsoft on Tuesday, adds new features to the 360 dashboard interface, designed to let gamers access some of their favorite social networks from the comfort of their sofa. Two of the biggest additions will allow 360 owners direct access to their Facebook and Twitter accounts, while other features include playing full 1080p hi-def videos streamed through Microsoft's Zune entertainment hub and getting your groove one via Last.fm's internet radio service.

Okay, I can hear a lot of you out there wondering about some of this already. After all, most of us already access our Facebook and Twitter accounts easily enough through our computers or mobile phones. It's not like there aren't already hundreds of application for that. For Microsoft, though, it's one more step into making the 360 more of an entertainment device than just a video game console. After all, if you just want to brag on Twitter about that new high score you got in Peggle or even just checking to see what your friends are up to on Facebook while taking a quick break, why fire up the desktop or search for your phone when you've already got the controller in your hand?

I've had the chance to play around with the new dashboard early, and I can tell right away that the new services were designed with the more casual user in mind. The Twitter interface, for example, is pretty basic but effective, with a lot more effort put into making a fun looking and easy to use front end, instead of really getting into the nit and grit of things with a host of options. The same thing applies to the Facebook client as well, though one interesting feature with it is how the client incorporates your Xbox LIVE friends into the Facebook application. If one of your Facebook friends is on Xbox LIVE or vice versa, you can tell right away and add them to the other list of friends with a quick click. Admittedly though, using either one of the clients loses a lot of that "convenient" feeling unless you've got one of the Xbox 360 chatpads. Trying to type with the 360 onscreen keyboard just doesn't cut it.

On the entertainment side of things, the new Zune integration feels like a good step forward for making the 360 an important piece of your home theater system. Before, if you wanted to watch a movie bought or rented through Xbox LIVE, you had to wait for most of the movie to finish downloading before you could start your movie night. Now you can stream movies in full 1080p resolution immediately after paying for it. You can even buy or rent a movie on your 360 and watch it later on a trip through your laptop or Zune. The streaming, at least in my experience, is a smooth experience. There's only been once or twice that a movie stopped to buffer, and even that was while maintenance work was being done on the internet in the area.

Of course, as the saying goes, everything has a price. And while the dashboard update and the included service are offered for free, it's not without some restrictions. In order to use the Last.fm, Twitter, and Facebook features of the new dashboard, you've got to be an Xbox LIVE Gold member and be at least 18 years or over. Also, as detailed before by our own Rafe Telsch, if you've picked up one of those less expensive, non-Microsoft, third party memory cards, it won't work on your system after installing the new update. So if you have one, make sure to copy the information over to your hard drive before taking the 360 online this week.

Sure, you can already do a lot of the new stuff offered on the Xbox 360 dashboard update through any number of connected devices, but it's still nice to have it instantly available through the console. It's all a matter of convenience. And with rumors swirling that Sony is looking to integrate Twitter and Facebook into the PlayStation 3 with an upcoming update, it looks like Microsoft simply was the first one off the starting line. I just can't help but wonder how long before we start seeing Twitter and Facebook integrated into other things ... like refrigerators. Hey they've got TVs built in them these days. It's only a matter of time.