Yesterday was a big day for XBox gamers and social networkers alike, as both Twitter and Facebook became available on XBox Live, the online multiplayer gaming and digital media delivery service that users of the XBox 360 can access to play multiplayer games and communicate with other XBox users. The implementation is significant because it marks one of the first major inroads that microblogging platform Twitter has made on "untraditional" devices - meaning devices other than a computer or mobile phone. But just how good is the feature, exactly?

According to some hardcore XBox social networkers, it's not actually particularly good. One significant blogger, Jared Newman, calls social networking on the XBox an experience that feels like being trapped in glass - since XBox live doesn't have a web browser, weblinks on Twitter don't work, and as he points out, half the fun of Twitter is the content that people link to. Add into that the difficulty of actually responding to any messages on either service (users who wish to actually engage on the social networks will need to purchase the $30 XBox Messaging Kit) and what you have is an underfeatured implementation of social networking.

While some XBox users will surely be willing to shell out the $30 in order to prevent themselves from having to (gasp) actually stand up and walk over to their computer in order to reply to a message or engage in a social network, many others will be unwilling or unable to afford the kit, and will therefore remain "trapped in glass" as far as social networking on XBox is concerned.

Still, though, the implementation of the two social networks on XBox Live is promising, if only because it represents the beginning of the proliferation of social networking off of computers and mobile phones and directly onto devices. There are plenty of gaming consoles out there, and many of them have a service like XBox Live - and any of them, at any point, could implement social networking on them. Facebook on the Wii, anyone? That could happen. Twitter on Valve's Steam client? That would actually be quite nice, since many Steam users are also Twitter users (if yesterday's Left 4 Dead 2 trending topics are any indicator).

The point is, social networking doesn't just have to live on your computer or mobile phone anymore. Any device with an even moderately complex programming architecture could implement it, and who knows where it'll stop? A coffee maker that tweets your brewing preferences to your friends? A refrigerator that sends out Facebook status updates when you're running out of milk? These are pretty far-fetched, but something more realistic, like social networking for an automobile's dashboard computing system aren't so wild. As long as there's a growing demand for social network accessibility, we'll probably continue to see this kind of proliferation onto networked devices - and that's actually pretty cool, all things considered.