Twitter integrated into iOS 5 with MediaStream? ⇥

9 to 5 Mac:

So it appears that the pieces are starting to come together. It appears that Apple may include your Twitter social graph in [Media Stream].

Apple is obviously friendly with Twitter in its Ping social network and currently works with Facebook and Flickr through iPhoto. iCloud may be the act of tying it all together.

This is highly speculative, but if Apple were to launch some sort of Path/Instagram capability baked right into iOS, I can’t help but think they’d need a way outside iOS to access it. Both Path and Instagram generate URLs whereby anyone can view your photos. By contrast, both Ping and Game Center require iTunes or iOS 4, respectively, just to view a user’s profile.

Sadly, Apple’s success with both social networks and web integration has been poor. They currently operate two social networks: Ping and Game Center. Neither seem to be particularly successful, and neither has a web interface. On the other hand, Apple has done a sort of photo stream before, with iPhoto and web galleries. Publishing a web gallery requires a MobileMe account, but anyone (with access) can view it online.

Apple needs to do a few things to make an Instagram competitor successful:

  1. It needs to have decent uptime: remember when MobileMe launched? Don’t do that again.
  2. It needs to have a non-iOS way of viewing published photos: don’t lock people into the Apple platform. If they want this to be a big, cool thing that people will actually use, there needs to be a way for people to see the photos from whatever computer they’re using.
  3. It needs to integrate with current social networks: Instagram allows me to publish to a myriad of services, and Path has some great Facebook integration.
  4. It needs to be free: I’m not even considering paying $99 per year for what MobileMe currently offers, let alone a few extra little things. That said, if they can make MobileMe really, really awesome (iTunes library in the cloud, for instance), I may consider it.