Sometimes when I review movies on this site, I write about them as I watch. Had I put out this review 10 mins sooner, I might have given The Invisible an A+, 4 stars or 2 thumbs up. Unfortunately though, time was not on this movie’s side and it got really stupid, really fast.

The Invisible can be summed up as Ghost for a new generation, with teenage actors. It follows the life of honor student Nick Powell (Justin Chatwin) as he navigates high school, and a dysfunctional family life. Nick gets caught up in the equally dysfunctional life of Annie Newton (Margarita Levieva), schoolyard bully and hooligan.

Annie is that bad ass, steal your lunch money kind of thug that would ordinarily be a guy. Did I mention she is hot? Under that hoodie she wears is a strikingly attractive girl. Not to be entirely stereotypical here (fuck it, I will anyway) I see Annie more as a cheerleader than a ringleader.

Regardless, Annie exacts vengeance on Nick when her boyfriend turns her in for robbing a store. Only, she doesn’t know it was her boyfriend who snitched. When she puts the heat on the school kids, including Nick’s best friend Pete, he rolls over to save his ass and blames Nick (who Pete thinks went to London). Why blame your best friend who the hell knows.

So Annie beats Nick down to an inch of his life which puts Nick in a state of "limbo" between life and death. This limbo state makes it so that Nick is invisible (a ghost, which cannot interact directly with other humans). He can, however, interact with animals, so man’s best friend starts the police on the trail of his killer.

Through this long and sometimes absurd process of helping bumbling cops solve the crime, Nick falls in love with Annie (as my coworker says, "we fall for the ones who kill us").

The acting in The Invisible isn’t bad. I think the problem with the movie was the story, development of the characters (why should we care about Annie) and maybe the casting of Annie. The mom was a little weak as well. I actually really liked Justin’s performance. I won’t spoil the ending other than to say, it made no sense to me whatsoever.

Now here is an unexpected use for Facebook - campus security.

Yep, school administrators are catching on that their students spend much of their time online, on Facebook or glued to their cell phones. In response to recent spikes in school violence (Virginia Tech, St. Johns and UW-Madison) both schools and the police are getting the word out using text messaging systems or by posting alerts on Facebook.

"Nearly every major college and university in the country is either in the process of implementing a text message warning system or seriously considering do it," said S. Daniel Carter, senior vice president of Security on Campus, a nonprofit organization based in King of Prussia, Pa., that pushes for safer college campuses.

I think this is a cool use of technology. Being that I work at a school, and being that there have been occasions recently with violence (hey, it seems to happen everywhere these days), you’re more likely to alert people who spend almost all of their time by sending them messages while they are online! It is fast, effecient and cheap. Simply blast out a text to all of your employees cell phones and/or post something on Facebook.

Right now I think Twitter is the most exciting app to hit the web in a very, very long time. People often hear about the concept (coworkers included) and think:

"What’s so great about Twitter? I don’t need to tell the world whenever I do the stupidest little things."

And they are right, you don’t need to tell the world that - so don’t! Use Twitter for something else, something more interesting.

I learn so many new things from the people I befriend on Twitter, and I only follow a handful of people. I get all the breaking sports and world news as soon as it happens. I get all the latest rumors in the tech world as they happen. I get to follow the lives of some pretty interesting people. I get entertained. I get to see pictures of some whacky experiments and some bleeding edge technology.

It wasn’t until I saw a friend tweet about the new iPhone firmware upgrade that I realized I could now access the iTunes WiFi store. It wasn’t until I got a tweet from Barack Obama that he had a rally in NYC that I could watch live on my computer.

Twitter is pretty much the coolest new way of communicating online OR offline, period.

Today they launched a new service for Twitter which lets you track any mention of a certain keyword on their entire public chat network. Simply texting "track iphone" to Twitter instantly put me into the conversation of thousands of other Twitterers and what they thought of the new iPhone update today.

Such a simple feature but one that changes everything about how the service works. Used to be you needed to know who you wanted to follow on Twitter OR scan the public timeline by hand to see what people were talking about. Now I can choose to receive messages from people I may not already know, but who are talking about something I care about.

I absolutely love Twitter. It is the future (hell, the present) for online communication.