Is Twitter Going To Be The Social Layer Of iOS 5?

There are a number of rumors swirling around that suggest 1/ Twitter is getting into the photo sharing business, and 2/ Apple may be integrating that solution at a fundamental level of the new iOS 5, to be announced next week:

MG Siegler, Twitter Getting Photos In Order Ahead Of iOS 5 Integration

Yesterday, we first reported that Twitter was on the verge of launching their own photo-sharing service. That report has since been confirmed by Liz Gannes, who happens to work for All Things D, which is hosting a conference where Twitter CEO Dick Costolo was planning to announce this news. So, yeah. “Sources familiar with the matter.” Confirmed.

[…]

We’ve heard from multiple sources that Twitter is likely to have a big-time partner for such a service: Apple. Specifically, we’re hearing that Apple’s new iOS 5 will come with an option to share images to Twitter baked into the OS. This would be similar to the way you can currently share videos on YouTube with one click in iOS. Obviously, a user would have to enable this feature by logging in with their Twitter credentials in iOS. There would then be a “Send to Twitter” option for pictures stored on your device.

Apple announced today that they plan to show off iOS 5 for the first time at WWDC next week, confirming a report of ours from March. Now you see why Twitter would want to get this picture service out there ASAP. And why they’d want their own service.

As usual, John Gruber is way out ahead of the industry news folks, and wonders at a grander scale:

So close to the bigger story, but yet so far. Imagine what else the system could provide if your Twitter account was a system-level service.

I’ve been hand waving about the coming of a social OS for a long time, and suggesting that iOS is the perfect place for Apple to take control of the future. Here’s one mention from six months ago:

Stowe Boyd, Rockmelt: Why The Social Browser Won’t Matter

The next generation of operating systems will be social at the core. We won’t be fooling with files and folders. We will be connecting with others, reading streams from our friends, and tossing observations and hopes and insights into the wake we leave behind, spreading out to all that think we matter.

So, yes, browsers will be social in that new social world, but so what? Everything will be.

And another, even older:

Stowe Boyd, (Social) iTunes In The Cloud

Perhaps Apple is going to make social interaction a fundamental aspect of next generation operating platforms, so that global user identities will be used for more than logging in, and actions like following people and posting to your streamlings will be primary to the user experience, not implemented in a hundred incompatible ways by applications.

Could Twitter become part of that new social OS infrastructure? If so, why would Apple want to allow Twitter to operate as an independent company?

Yes, sure, it is possible to idealize Twitter as just an API, a service layer of a new architectural stack, that could — in principle — be replaced by some other implementation. In that way, Apple might abstract away from needing to possess Twitter.

But Twitter isn’t just the implementation of some collection of API calls: it is an existing and growing community of users.

If Apple wants to launch a next generation operating platform based on social principles, it would help to have a community like Twitter’s as your baseline for adoption. It’s filled with the world’s journalists and technocrats, for example. And it’s seething with revolutionary power and impetus.

So, maybe Jobs is going to announce an acquisition, and not just an integration?

Twitter photo integration rumored for iOS 5 (news.cnet.com)
Twitter integrated into iOS 5 with MediaStream? (9to5mac.com)
iOS 5 rumored to come with system-level Twitter integration (edibleapple.com)

9 notes

gadgetblogger reblogged this from emergentfutures
tsparks liked this
emergentfutures reblogged this from stoweboyd
gregariously answered: Interestingly enough, Android is already much more of a social os than anything out there yet. Looking forward to see if Apple “gets it” yet
deepthinking liked this
robertauguste reblogged this from stoweboyd
dianapop reblogged this from stoweboyd
gravity7 reblogged this from stoweboyd
dianapop liked this
stoweboyd posted this