Did Twitter just leapfrog Facebook?
As Chris discussed during his extensive coverage of Apple’s WWDC segment, one of the bigger announcements from their session had to do with the integration of Twitter with iOS 5, the newest version of the iPhone operating system. To some, this particular marriage of the popular social media service and the mobile device that’s synonymous with mobile communications could very well change the way mobile applications are developed, especially for the iPhone environment.
Over at ReadAndWriteWeb, there’s a good breakdown of what the partnership could mean, and if the following idea is close to being accurate — “iOS apps will look like, feel like, read from and publish to Twitter like never before. And they’ll do that in many cases instead of using Facebook” — the idea of Twitter and Apple ruling the applications world may not be that far-fetched, regardless of how popular the Android environment is.
Apparently, the Twitter integration introduces features to iOS 5 that will be similar to Facebook’s mobile capabilities. In fact, as pointed out in the RWW post, thanks to the partnership with the iPhone, Twitter essentially beat Facebook to the punch of making “everything social.” Granted, Facebook is still one of the more popular applications for the iPhone, laying the groundwork for a potential conflict. It’s doubtful Facebook’s developers would want to integrate Twitter features when both services are competing for social media supremacy.