Twitter said in a blog post Wednesday that users will be able to enroll in a login verification program. For those who sign up, Twitter will send a six-digit code using a text message each time they sign in to Twitter.com. Besides their username and password, users will have to enter the code as well to log in.

Microsoft Corp., Google Inc. and Facebook Inc. already allow two-step verification as an option. Twitter has been criticized for not having this option, especially following recent breaches of Twitter accounts belonging to major news organizations and other companies.

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After becoming millionaires and Olympic athletes, the genetically perfect Winklevii founded Winklevoss Capital, a private investment firm in February. Their first investment? A social networking site. Some boys never forget their first crush.

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Sandwiched between these words of wisdom -- taken from a book designed for babies -- was the obligatory non sequitur from some faculty member attempting to explain why the advice of "Plastics" was so funny in the "The Graduate." Maybe it would have been less irritating if these  weren't the exact same two quotes I was preached when accepting my diploma. Isn't it about time we threw out these two clichéd references and updated them with some more applicable cultural dialogue?

This is why I've started peppering my commencement addresses with more "hip" movie lines to appeal to a younger audience. In case anyone wants to hire me to talk at next year's graduation, I have my list ready:*

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But this season, a dark horse appeared on the horizon. While the first season of "Community" dealt with establishing the characters and giving Joel McHale a chance to prove he was more than just a pretty face from "The Soup," the second season quickly moved beyond the sly wink of self-awareness to become a show that reached, as Patton Oswalt describes it, "the ETEWAF* singularity." It was the closest TV has ever come to being the Internet (sorry, Tosh), with in-jokes doubling back on themselves the way a Television Without Pity forum thread might. Nothing was sacred: not Dungeons & Dragons, Charlie Kaufman or the Web itself (which creator Dan Harmon has used on occasion to throw his fans off-track with fake spoilers on his Twitter feed).

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One way of explaining what happened last night is that the Oscar producers tried to tack young and hip, just as academy voters tried to tack mass and mainstream, correcting for several years of more audacious indie-style winners like "The Hurt Locker," "Slumdog Millionaire" and "No Country for Old Men." The result was a great big middle-of-the-road splat, presided over by a monumentally uncomfortable pair of stars, the miffed-looking James Franco and the perky-like-a-little-coffeepot Anne Hathaway.

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I will admit to being totally suckered by the snippet from a "Grease" number that will apparently be performed by Oscar co-hosts James Franco and Anne Hathaway on Sunday night. Sneaking that out the way they did -- via Franco's Twitter feed -- is a nifty use of social media and sends a signal that the Oscars are hipper and savvier under the new regime. Or simultaneously hipper and suffused with nostalgia, which is even better. Now, I'd be delighted if they decide to do the whole damn show as selections from classic musicals: "West Side Story," anyone? "Oklahoma"? "The Band Wagon"? But any tiny flub by either of the stars -- a missed dance step or a mistimed lip-sync -- will launch a tide of snarky Tweets to rival the parting of the Red Sea.

The "updated" set design: Virtual reality or lame-ass PowerPoint?

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Except in the actual film, the scene cuts off after Justin says "You know what's cool?" Which is when the movie cuts to Eduardo in the court saying, "A billion dollars."

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Zuckerberg, the man whose brainchild Facebook has single-handedly sucked more productivity out of America than porn and Angry Birds combined, has made no secret of his discomfort with director David Fincher's chilling corporate drama "The Social Network" or the book that inspired it, Ben Mezrich's "The Accidental Billionaires." But as the tag line for the movie says, you don't get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies -- and we're not just talking Paul Ceglia here. You'd be hard-pressed to find someone who's ever been on Facebook who doesn't have a gripe about it, and, by extension, a gripe about its wunderkind CEO and president. Irked that they're trying to sell your privacy -- again?  Or that they're being absurdly puritanical about mothers and babies?  Or maybe you're just sick of all those Mob Wars requests. In light of all of Facebook's shady practices and generally high irritation level, who could begrudge the world a little malice toward its young bazillionaire honcho?

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Last night's Saturday Night Live opening was very confusing.

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Conventional wisdom has held for months that "The King's Speech" and "The Social Network," a pair of handsome and talky comedy-drama blends with biographical and historical roots, were the best-picture front-runners, and so it appears. (Furthermore, the latter will win, and I don't care how much tea-leaf reading to the contrary you hear in coming weeks.) Best actress is perceived as a race between Annette Bening's lesbian mom in "The Kids Are All Right" and Natalie Portman's demented ballerina in "Black Swan," and best actor as a race between Colin Firth, for his richly sympathetic portrayal of the stuttering King George VI in "The King's Speech," and, well, nobody in particular. Done and done.

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But it would be a mistake to say "The Social Network" merely transcribes Sorkin's script to the big screen. Fincher's direction is unassuming, save for a few cocky technical flourishes (such as hiring a single actor, Armie Hammer, to play Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's identical twin nemeses, the Winklevoss brothers). But that's not the same thing as bloodless. As New Yorker film blogger Richard Brody pointed out:

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Other best-drama nominees were the psychosexual dance thriller "Black Swan," the boxing saga "The Fighter," the sci-fi blockbuster "Inception" and the Facebook chronicle "The Social Network."

Nominees in the Globes' other best-picture category, for musical or comedy, are the Lewis Carroll fantasy "Alice in Wonderland," the song-and-dance extravaganza "Burlesque," the lesbian-family tale "The Kids Are All Right," the action tale "Red" and the romantic thriller "The Tourist."

"The Social Network" and "The Fighter" tied for second with six nominations each. Among nominations for "The Social Network" were Jesse Eisenberg as best dramatic actor, Andrew Garfield as supporting actor and David Fincher as director.

"The Fighter" earned four acting nominations, best actor for Mark Wahlberg and supporting honors for Christian Bale, Amy Adams and Melissa Leo. Its nominations also included a directing slot for David O. Russell.

Johnny Depp earned two nominations, as best musical or comedy actor for "Alice in Wonderland" and "The Tourist."

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Of course, the movie also explains how Facebook started as "FaceMash," a site for comparing the hotness of randomly paired students. Doody has done just that, only he's limited the rating to female students and he hasn't supplied the images of the girls himself. Instead of hacking campus servers for the eye candy a la Zuckerberg, he's asked users to post the photos themselves. Brace yourselves for the meta: The majority of the photos come from, where else, but Facebook. It's a good way to avoid legal issues, but it hasn't spared Doody any controversy. Reports the Washington Post today:

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Facebook said in a blog post Sunday the changes are meant to make it easier for users to tell their story -- who they are, where they work, their life philosophy and the most important people in their lives. The changes place a bigger emphasis on visuals, from photos to images of users' interests.

A new biography section includes not just who you are and where you live but a set of the most recent photos that your friends have "tagged" you in. Previously users had to click on a tab to see the latest photos on a profile. Users can also feature important friends in their profile, while previously only random selection appeared. And in addition to listing their job, users can now add the projects they worked on. It's all a move toward curating a more complete picture of a person, something that will likely appeal to Facebook's advertisers. The company did not make any changes to its privacy policy as part of the redesign.

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Let me save your comment-typin' fingers a workout and stipulate the following: No, the Oscars are no indication of quality, historically speaking; yes, the best films of the year (whether by my standards or yours) are often overlooked; and yes, covering movies by focusing overmuch on the Oscar race resembles the horse-race coverage of American politics and signifies the downfall of journalism in particular and civilization in general. But you want to know about it anyway, so let's move on. (Check out my Movie List for an utterly subjective and totally non-market-driven ranking of the year's best and worst movies.)

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After seeing the film, a coworker e-mailed me: "You would think no woman ever wrote a line of code or actually worked at a high-tech company. It makes Sterling Cooper look progressive." Indeed, there is no plucky Peggy, and there isn't even a Joan (who uses both her smarts and her sexuality to get ahead). But, oh, are there groupies: They aggressively undo belt buckles in bathroom stalls, take bong hits while the boys do their important coding work and rip open their blouses so that coke can be snorted off their flat little tummies. They are useless on the technical and business front, as is made clear in a scene where two groupies look on as Zuckerberg has a sudden revelation and begins barking orders to his all-male team. The doe-eyed coeds ask if there is anything they can do to help out -- and the question itself is a punch line. Even a nubile Facebook intern who presumably does have some technical abilities is introduced only to party with Facebook's smooth-talking president, Sean Parker (played by Justin Timberlake), at a Stanford frat party. The women are trophies for these male history-makers.

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"Was that a parable?" Zuckerberg deadpans.

You bet. So, for that matter, is "The Social Network." Like all good parables, you can apply it any number of ways. Roger Ebert, for instance, describes the movie's virtual spaces as a chessboard and Zuckerberg as Bobby Fischer. New Yorker film critic Richard Brody describes the movie as a 21st century tale of Jewish-American tenacity and as "the latter-day successor to 'Amadeus.'" A.O. Scott of the New York Times calls it "a movie about business" generally, not just Facebook, and an example of how Internet culture shatters class privilege. That these readings and others seem plausible -- even persuasive -- is a testament to the film's concision. Director David Fincher and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin provide enough information to push the story along while leaving imaginative space for viewers to roam around in.

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