Apple to fight Facebook with iOS 5 and Media Stream? - Mark Gurman
Ping was Apple’s first attempt at the social networking but it pales in comparison to what they have coming. Hidden deep in the iOS 4.3 file system is a new folder titled “Media Stream.” Within that folder is some information about “Photo Streaming.” From the looks of different alerts and plists, it appears that Apple will let iPhone users set up “Photo Streams” that friends could “subscribe” to. Also, it looks like there will be some privacy preferences related to this, so you can choose who is allowed to view your “Streams.”
With Photo Streams, you will also be allowed to “invite” other users to view your pictures as you take them and upload them to a service. This service looks like it is connected to MobileMe, and we speculate that “Media Stream” can be directly connected to “Find my Friends.” We think Find my Friends will be another aspect of Apple’s social network, a part of a free MobileMe, where you can choose to view your friends’ “Photo Streams” all on that same map. Apple has a patent on something called iGroups relating to this. This would clearly tie into the Mac and iOS photo app’s Places feature. From looking at the SDK, it looks like “Media Stream” could very well also have a plugin counterpart, like AirPlay, in 3rd party apps.
From the actual operating system, not the SDK, we could only find references and graphics relating to the “Photo Stream” feature, not the “Media Stream” feature in general. We speculate that Apple is currently working on “Media Stream” and this is going to go way beyond photos in the future. We think Apple will expand this to music and videos, maybe like AirPlay between mobile iOS devices where you can watch or listen to your friends’ media and of course Apple will provide easy buy links to iTunes.
Speculating further, the Media Stream has to be stored somewhere, it isn’t just going to live on your iOS device. We believe this is where Apple’s Cloud infrastructure comes in.
Apple seems to be headed in the direction I have been predicting for some time, making the operating system social. Looks like we will see some real first giant steps in iOS 5 (or earlier), when Apple unveils Find my Friends and Photo Streams.
As I have said many times before, this is the real challenge for Facebook is not other social networks, but social OS’s.
Imagine the integration of something like Ping at the OS level, along with generalized posting, media sharing, and the like. Could be a bit challenge for first generation social networks that are based on a closed silo model.
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