It seems safer and safer to say that iOS5 is going to be the most radical reinvention of the way the iPhone works yet, as more of the contours of what Apple’s going to be announcing come into focus.
Twitter’s launching its own photo service seemed pretty innocuous, unless you were running one of the photo sharing sites it’s going to murder, like yFrog. Except that one of the major partners for the service is gonna be Apple, according to TechCrunch. Specifically, the ability to push photos to Twitter is gonna be a core part of the OS. To which Daring Fireball adds:
“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.”
Well, one way to imagine it would be like Windows Phone Mango, which has Facebook, Twitter and Bing baked into almost every aspect of the core software, from contacts to communications.
The iPhone does a lot of things better than any other phone. But one thing it doesn’t do better than anyone is share. Or connect. It feels strikingly unconnected after you’ve used an Android phone, actually, because Android oozes internet out of every pixel. So what Gruber hints is a big deal, very much is so. Particularly when you consider all of the other pieces waiting in the wings.
More and more, I’m thinking iCloud won’t just be the iTunes music locker, but it’ll be the wholesale replacement of MobileMe as well. Syncing contacts, email, photo and data storage? Those are all things other services do for free, and better. They’re just table stakes, something Apple simply should have built into the iPhone. Making that just another reasonable piece to add to this connected iOS. And less certainly, there’s Apple’s recent acquisition of Siri, a voice search company.
So yeah, it’s easy to see that Twitter’s just a tiny little piece. [TechCrunch, Daring Fireball]