That’s what happened after his presence caused 3000 hysteric teen girls to march into the Roosevelt Field mall, pushing everyone and each other aggressively. The police asked him to use Twitter to help disperse the multitude, which was getting increasingly violent. When he didn’t comply, they arrested Bieber’s label VP, James A. Roppo:

We asked for his help in getting the crowd to go away by sending out a Twitter message. By not cooperating with us we feel he put lives in danger and the public at risk.

He is now waiting to be charged, probably with “criminal nuisance, endangering the welfare of a minor and obstructing government administration”. After that, the kid used Twitter to ask all the teen girls to go home because the performance got cancelled. Except for the two cute blondes with ultra-short skirts by the lolly shop, and the redhead with the big cleavage ordering pizza at the food court.

It seems to me a bit extreme and stupid, much like that kid who got cleared of criminal charges because of his status update. Why wouldn’t the police disperse the crowd by announcing the same thing using a megaphone? Or knocking them all with long-range tasers? I can go for that or for smoke grenades. Probably both.

But would a tweet make such a difference? What if Twitter didn’t exist? [Newsday via All Things D]

First, and most obvious, is because it makes for a bizarre juxtaposition between the ancient OS 9 (or OS 8, or Systems 6 and 7) and Twitter, and self-consciously modern online service that would’ve seemed ridiculous in the age of the Bondi Blue iMac. And second, because the tiny slice of the population who still earnestly uses OS 9 is either clinically paranoid, hasn’t read a software review since the year 2000, or is stuck with a 10-year-old desktop by some truly bizarre or unfortunate circumstance, all of which would make for some top-rate tweeting.

See you on Tweetmeme, @ClintonLied_Y2K, and @Ivebeenlockedinthebasementagainstmywillsinceiwas4! [Retards.org via Gartenberg's Twitter]

To recap, here’s what’s new:

• Facebook – Update your status to share what movie, game or entertainment you’re enjoying, connect with friends and view their Facebook stream, status updates and photos on the big screen – all seamlessly integrated and custom-built for Xbox 360. You can even compare your Xbox LIVE and Facebook friends lists to see which of your friends are on LIVE.
• Zune – Zune video on Xbox LIVE offers a full fidelity experience with instant on HD in 1080p and 5.1 channel surround sound. No waiting for downloads or buffering, it’s there at the press of a button. You can also share the experience with up to seven friends through voice chat and Avatar integration on the TV screen – it puts a whole new spin on “movie night.”
• Twitter – Stay in the know by discovering, posting and replying to Tweets right on your Xbox 360. You can even view friend profiles, trends and conversations, or search to see who’s tweeting about your favourite game.
• Last.fm – Discover more music and explore endless personalised radio stations with Last.fm on Xbox 360. Skip, “ban” or “love” tracks to create your perfect mix-we’ve even built in “Gamer Stations” with game-related types of music selected specifically for the gaming community (Available in the U.S. and UK)

In addition to these social features, Xbox LIVE will also be debuting “News and More,” a new section of the “Inside Xbox” channel, transforming Xbox LIVE into a full-fledged media portal. With a regularly-updated stream of content from MSNBC, The New Yorker and Dilbert, “News and More” brings the latest in current events, arts and entertainment right to your fingertips.

The Nikon Festival has the theme “A Day Through Your Lens”, and asks budding filmmakers to upload digital films with that theme, of lengths less than 140 seconds, to their website. The contest is six weeks long, starting right now. Festival judges include Rainn Wilson (Dwight Schrute of The Office fame), photographer Chase Jarvis, and some girl unfortunately described as an “Internet Personality” with the even more unfortunate name of iJustine. But guys, Rainn Wilson!

Oh yeah, and Ashton Kutcher will be sharing his own entry, partly because he has an advertising deal with Nikon and partly because this contest is tangentially related to Twitter. That ’70s Show was a long time ago, you know, and now Twitter is his job — and Ashton Kutcher is nothing if not dedicated to his job.

The winning filmmaker will get $US100,000 and some sweet Nikon gear, and there’ll also be an audience favourite award worth $US25,000, in case iJustine is out of touch with modern independent filmmaking. [Nikon Festival]

The original Peek, which just runs email, is something I would never buy in a million years. But I could understand why some people might like it. It’s simple, its inexpensive and it lets you run email without paying for a fancy smartphone plan. That’s fine. Email is important and universally useful.

But this? Twitter only? Twitter is something that you can do easily on a smartphone, yes, but it’s also something you can use easily on any phone. It’s a service based on text messaging, for god’s sake! In practice, you could use Twitter on your phone no matter what phone you have. Hell, even StarTacs supported SMS and could use Twitter, if you happen to still be using one.

But let’s assume you don’t have a smartphone.

Maybe they expect this to be used by people without mobile phones at all? Why would anyone carry a device that does only Twitter instead of getting a basic free mobile phone that can call friends and restaurants and companies with phones (all of them)?

And really, if you’re so hooked on Twitter than you want to have it on you at all times, the chances are good that you’re also hooked on email, IM, texts and probably the services that a few other apps would provide. This is a device built around an app, basically. The iPhone, BlackBerry, Pre, Windows Mobile, Symbian and Android all have great Twitter apps. But do they deserve their own devices? What’s next, a dedicated Fieldrunners or Yelp device? How about a batman utility belt full of, like, 20 devices each doing the equivalent of one app, for seven bucks a month?

Sure, one could argue that it chooses to do one thing and to do it well, with simplicity and affordability. You could compare it to the Flip, for example, which makes shooting video easy and cheap. But the Flip does far more, for the money, and decent video isn’t something you find on most smartphones. The Flip beats camcorders by doing 90 per cent of what they do for 20 per cent of the cost. This does 1 per cent of what smartphones can do for 25 per cent of the cost. It’s just not a good value, despite it being cheap.

The real kicker? This thing has one single function, and it can’t even do that very well. PC Mag just gave it 1.5 stars! This is totally damning:

But as soon as I started handling the TwitterPeek, I knew something was wrong. This handheld is painfully slow. Scrolling through button selections or on-screen lists, the cursor is always a bit behind your trackwheel.

TwitterPeek also fails at the most basic function: reading tweets. The main list of tweets only shows the first three and a half words of each message; to read more, you have to dig down by hitting the ‘return’ key. Then you can step through tweets, slowly, one by one, with the ‘n’ (for next) and ‘p’ (for previous) keys, or jump back up to the unreadable full list of truncated messages. The whole process is slow and annoying.

Not everybody wants or needs a smartphone, such as the iPhone or Droid. They’re relatively expensive and cost more per month than a dumbphone. But the fact of the matter is, if you’re looking to have a lot of mobile functionality, it makes way more sense to consolidate your needs on one well-designed product than to clutter up your pockets with a dumbphone, a TwitterPeek, a digital camera and a GPS unit. This is a device that is built on flawed logic and executed poorly. I can’t think of a single person in a single situation where this would make sense.

I just can’t believe this thing exists.

Tweet Tweet Twitter actually makes the most natural jump to the Xbox. It’s a really basic app, with your timeline, search, and trending topics, but it works, largely because the vertical stream is preserved, even if you can only see four (very legible) tweets at a time, so you won’t be power-browsing, TweetDeck style, by any means. It’s slow, and typing’s reeeeeeeally frustrating, like having your eyeballs poked out one pinprick at a time, if you don’t have the chatpad (part of me thinks this entire update is all a giant conspiracy to sell more Xbox 360 chatpads). Updates can sometimes take forever to hit your Twitter stream, too. Still, it’s pretty, and works the best of the new apps.

Facebookin’ Facebook uses the standard Xbox tile UI instead of rolling its interface, like Twitter did. Which is disorienting (and disappointing), since you’re browsing through a stream horizontally, one choppily-animated tile at a time. Why is the tile-sliding animation so terrible on a monster console like the Xbox 360? We don’t know. Like Twitter, it’s basic—focused on Newsfeeds. Your groups are ported over, so you can browse their newsfeeds individually, but you literally have to browse one post at a time, which is agonising, making you far less inclined to comment on updates. The interface works much better, and feels way more natural, with photo albums. What’s interesting is that, at least in the preview, your friends have to link their Xbox Live and Facebook accounts together themselves in order to show up in the “Xbox Live Friends on Facebook” (and vice versa) pages—you can’t manually go in and link Jason Chen’s accounts so you’ll see them together in your app.

Last.fm This would be would be way better if it could play in the background. It can’t. Meaning once you link your accounts and all of you stations are nicely and automatically ported over, to listen to Last.fm, you just have to sit there and leave it running, with band pictures floating up to your screen every once in a while. Lame.

Zune Video Marketplace Not a whole lot to write home about yet besides 1080p streams—it’s a video store on Xbox, with movies for rent or purchase, TV shows, trailers—but Zune Video is here and it, um, works. You browse through the standard Xbox interface, like Netflix. We didn’t get a chance to use the possible killer feature—Party mode, where you can watch stuff with your friends—yet, but if anything makes the Zune video store really stand out, that could be it. Previews, alas, didn’t come in at 1080p, even over FiOS, which clearly has the bandwidth to deliver.

All in all, the new apps, they’re interesting, they add something, but with the exception of Zune Video Marketplace, aren’t critical. At least for now.

The option is incredibly simple to setup. You just insert your Twitter ID and password, then select at what points you want the game to tweet about – options include when you start playing multiplayer online, when you complete a chapter, when you earn trophies, when you earn multiplayer money or when you reach a level milestone.

Now, for me, not all of this is appealing. I don’t want to tweet every single time I earn a trophy, for example. But I do like the idea of tweeting when I start playing multiplayer, so that perhaps people on my social network may decide to join me. But fortunately you can customise what parameters you want to tweet about. What’s even better is that the tweet itself (at least for the multiplayer one) includes a link to my stats page for the game on Naughty Dog’s website, so people can see just how bad I am at multiplayer games (or they will, when I actually manage to finish one…)

The only problem with this arrangement is that it’s (so far) restricted to the one (albeit awesome) game on PS3. At the moment, there’s not a lot of info on whether the Xbox Twitter integration will allow automatic updating when certain parameters are met, but hopefully it will. Because the idea of melding social networking with gaming is pretty exciting, at least in terms of merging a couple of different aspects of your online presence.