It was only yesterday that we came to you with news that iTunes 9 may include the ability to visually organize and arrange apps along with some sort of social networking integration. Today, Boy Genius Report has provided additional information that was obtained from their “pretty reliable source” detailing some of those rumored iTunes 9 features.
According to their source, Apple plans to tie iTunes 9 into a completely separate social application that they plan to release sometime in the future. This separate application will apparently be similar to Yahoo’s OneConnect, merging multiple social networking services into a single interface. The application will allow you to broadcast the music you are currently listening to, share it with others on your network, connect with your friend’s friends, and send status updates to all of your services at once. It wasn’t made clear if this application would be a mobile or a desktop application.
They also revealed more information regarding app organization. iTunes 9 will reportedly be able to sort apps alphabetically, by genre, by date added, and will also allow you to to create custom arrangements.
What do you think? Are all of these rumored iTunes 9 features believable? Or is the idea of a separate social networking application going a bit too far?
Sorting by name would be cool, but i’d rather sort by category. Obviously there’s coding embedded into each app that designates its category (which is how the appstore categorizes it), so It would be nice to be able to arrange the apps in the springboard that way. Alphabetizing doesn’t always work because the title of the app doesn’t always label what it is. For instance, the best buy app is entitled weekly deals. When i search for the app through spotlight, i’ll type in, best buy, and nothing will appear. Oh yeah, the best buy app isn’t called best buy.
I couldn’t care less about the social networking features. But for the app categorizing, I’d really love the ability to have “playlists” for apps. Syncing three iPhones on one computer and having unique app requirements per iPhone gets to be annoying when syncing. Hopefully, that “custom arrangements” fixes this annoyance.
I would like to see the ability to organize my app pages on my iphone (i.e. categorize an app and then also assign to a page number) within iTunes). Truthfully, not sure it will be any easier than doing that on the phone, but it would be nice to try.
I certainly hope this is optional. I don’t want a bunch of social networking crap on my iPod Touch.