iOS 5 Social Integration To Have More Friends Than Twitter, After All
June 10, 2011
Liz Gannes of All Things D has some new information about the extent to which Apple's planned social integration will be implemented in its forthcoming iOS 5.
Leaked by an anonymous developer, proof of Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn, and Myspace support is shown in the screenshot below.
Says Gannes,
The inclusion of the feature shows Apple’s acknowledgement of the importance of Web presences and contact information. But it could be much more useful if users don’t have to enter each of their friends’ handles manually, as appears to be the case at least in this release.While Twitter is a deep-seated part of iOS 5 and automatically loads your contacts and syncs account information using individual service credentials, the rest of these networks require manual "friend" entry that makes things a bit more tedious. It may be some time before automatic authentication is added to the full social lineup, though. As you might guess, money and security are the key issues for all companies involved. Gannes reminds us that
Facebook, Google and Apple all want to own and protect their relationships with their users, which is why exchanging contact lists arouses such drama. Before striking a deal with Twitter, Apple was going to use Facebook as a social distribution and identity service for its Ping music social network, but that deal fell apart, with Apple CEO Steve Jobs explaining that Facebook demanded “onerous terms.”Personally, I don't like the idea of any social website functionality defaulted onto my cellphone, but that's for another post another time. I do think, however, that most folks will welcome these additions.
