| 'Gears of War 3' puts bloody bow on trilogy and Pandora overhauls site amid Web music boom |
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(CNN) -- With an awesome story and continuation of the gameplay that has made the franchise great, "Gears of War 3" ties a brilliant and bloody bow atop a video-game trilogy that's been seven years in the making.The latest third-person shooter game from Epic Games and Microsoft wraps up the "Gears" story arc and answers all the lingering questions that have arisen in the battle against the reptilian Locust and their mutant cousins, the Lambent.Players will control Coalition soldier Marcus Fenix for most of the game. But certain levels require the player to switch off to another member of his Delta Squad.The game starts a couple years after the conclusion of "Gears 2" and finds Marcus in jail. Characters familiar to players of the franchise are re-introduced in the opening scenes, and the action kicks off quickly at an unrestrained pace.Combat typically offers four options for weapons: a primary weapon, secondary weapon, pistol and grenade. [Read the full article] (CNN) -- Facebook unveiled a new version of its website on Thursday that's based around the idea of a personal "timeline" rather than its standard profile pages."Timeline is a completely new aesthetic for Facebook," CEO Mark Zuckerberg said at the social network's annual conference in San Francisco.The pages look more like blogs than a social-networking site. A large photo covers the top of the pages, stretching from one side of the screen to the other. And posts -- like photos, status updates and the locations a person visits -- show up below that, attached to a vertical and chronological timeline.This new Timeline look will replace users' current profile pages -- but not their news feeds -- within several weeks. The world's largest social network, with more than 750 million users, just launched a new version of its homepages earlier this week.The company also unveiled a new version of its app network, which also is launching over coming weeks. [Read the full article] Editor's note: Douglas Rushkoff is a media theorist and the author of "Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age" and "Life Inc: How Corporatism Conquered the World and How We Can Take it Back."(CNN) -- The ire and angst accompanying Facebook's most recent tweaks to its interface are truly astounding. The complaints rival the irritation of AOL's dial-up users back in the mid-'90s, who were getting too many busy signals when they tried to get online. The big difference, of course, is that AOL's users were paying customers. In the case of Facebook, which we don't even pay to use, we aren't the customers at all.Let's start with the changes themselves. Until now, the main thing that showed up on users' pages was a big list of "updates" from all the friends and companies and groups to which they were connected. [Read the full article] 
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