Twentieth Century Fox is hoping to lure viewers back to the cratering DVD market–by offering them an endless series of digital distractions during home releases of the studio’s movies.

FoxPop, a technology that makes its debut next month, works like a specialized Twitter feed, offering up a string of trivia, photos and shopping suggestions during selected movies.

Users can run the application on their computers or their iPhones or iPod touches. It syncs with the movie, displaying material that is supposed to be relevant to what is happening on-screen at that moment.

FoxPop is to make its debut Dec. 1 with the home-video release of “Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian,” this year’s sequel to the 2006 Ben Stiller comedy. Fox hired a marketing company to write a string of informational tidbits and quizzes about the movie’s stars, props and setting, which is filled with artworks and artifacts from the museum’s archives.

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Is a computer with no disk drive and no applications software still a computer?

Litl LLC, a small Boston company, says its eponymous Litl device is the future of personal computing. Litl is a Web computer with a full keyboard and an operating system designed for people who use online software like Google Docs and store their photos on Flickr or Shutterfly.

On its screen, a viewer sees 12 business-card-sized Web pages. Clicking on the desired page expands it to full screen, and the user can read the page, buy shoes or build a spreadsheet. It doesn’t have icons, files or menus of its own.

The device can also be flipped up into an A-frame so the screen is visible to show photos, videos or text-news feeds that can be seen from across a room.

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Hearst today launched LMK.com, a low-cost Web roundup on topics from college football to reality television.

(For the youth-challenged, “LMK” is the texting shorthand for “let me know.”)

LMK joins a crowded field of aggregation sites, which cull news and information from across the Web and organize them by topic or in other user-friendly ways. Other aggregators include Topix, Newser and Daylife, and sites like the Daily Beast that combine aggregation with their own content.

LMK will be nearly entirely automated, with just one full-time employee. Initially, the most developed part of the site is about college football, with news, blog posts, photos and statistics. It will roll out new topics every few weeks.

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Back in March, I asked people to quit whining about Facebook’s redesign. It wasn’t that I liked the radical changes the site had made–they were unquestionably terrible. In the past, Facebook would roll all of your friends’ recently added photos, notes, and status updates into a few new posts a day; now the site shows you an ever-changing “stream” of activity, with new stuff from everyone in your network popping up as it happens.

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Facebook is testing a new privacy setting that for the first time allows its members to share their status updates and items with a wider Internet audience than just Facebook members.

The status update box–now called Publisher and an all-purpose location for updates, links and photos–will allow users to customize their audience. When Facebook opens the feature to all of its members (”soon,” it says), they’ll be able to specify whether they want to share the submission with their friends, their broader networks or to “everyone,” including the rest of the Web.

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The White House is making unprecedented use of consumer web technologies but those technologies aren’t always well suited to fit the government’s needs. They aren’t always well suited to fit anyone’s needs–but maybe if Obama leans on them a little bit things will change.

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Google (GOOG), which been pruning some early-stage products amid slower growth and the downturn, introduced two experiments Monday: a service that displays news search results in a chronological timeline and a way to find more relevant images.

The first of the two, called Google News Timeline, presents the globs of content already in Google News–including articles, blogs, photos, scanned newspapers, magazine covers and more–in a draggable timeline. Users who search for a topic like the Iraq War will see a history of articles, photos and videos arranged by date, week or month and can scroll through them quickly with their mouse. Users can refine their search to specific sorts of news, like newspapers or blogs, and search some non-news sources like Wikipedia or movies.

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It seemed like more troubling evidence that kids these days engage in behavior they wouldn’t want to write home about. Researchers recently found that one in five teenagers have shared nude or seminude photos of themselves by cellphone or online.

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The laptop computers most people haul around are underutilized. They hardly break a sweat to read email, stream video, view photos, browse the Web, or run word-processing or spreadsheet programs. Their powerful processors are rarely tested except by heavy-duty gamers, scientific researchers, or other specialized users. So while some PCs continue to bulk up and tout their speed and raw power, others represent a new trend: slimming down. Way down. These smaller, simpler machines are aimed at a potentially lucrative market: the next 1 billion PC users around the planet.

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The Associated Press reported yesterday that it was able to use an undisclosed method to access private photos on Facebook, including some from Paris Hilton at the Emmys and others from Facebook founding CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s vacation in November of 2005.

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There was a time not so long ago when home computers sat on desks away from the main action in households. People used them for basic productivity tasks such as word processing and spreadsheets. Now, things have changed to the point where our home computers have become a center of our entertainment universe, offering up music, videos and photos.

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