Users may see more Tweets in future updates to iOS and OS X. According to Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, Twitter is working with Apple on injecting Tweets into the Spotlight feature on iPhones, iPads, iPod touches, and Macs. Costolo made the comments as part of yesterday’s Twitter quarterly earnings call, according to a transcript:
And finally, we are also working with Apple to surface great Twitter content and accounts directly in Spotlight Search on iOS and OS X, that also makes it easier and quicker to find great things on Twitter. So I would sum up by saying, there is absolutely an opportunity to go and monetize that attention and traffic. We want to make sure we iterate on the experiences to get them right first.
Spotlight on iOS and OS X already integrates with Twitter when searching for specific hashtags, but Costolo’s remarks makes it sound like more functionality is on the way.
Spotlight is Apple’s in-house search platform for iOS and OS X that can search across a device’s physical storage as well as the web. Over the past couple of years, Apple has made Spotlight a more critical aspect of the Apple device experience by adding Bing Search and Wikipedia integration. Given that Siri already surfaces Tweets, a Spotlight partnership would not come as much as a surprise.
Apple began partnering up on initiatives with Twitter by adding deep Twitter integration into iOS in 2011 with iOS 5 and adding the same functionality to OS X with Mountain Lion in 2012. Costolo did not comment on when additional Twitter Spotlight integration with launch, but perhaps Apple will discuss Spotlight improvements at WWDC with the introductions of iOS 9 and OS X 10.11.
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As long as it can be turned off…
I get the same tweet when typing #baltimore.
“Great Twitter Content” – umm, what? That’s like saying “The Sweetest Unicorn Tears” – neither exist.
When I use spotlight, I’m looking for something on my computer – maybe my backup volume. Extending it to my local network in the form of Appleshare and Samba volumes with a persistent connection would be great as well. But more third-party content? Something as utterly useless as searching for tweets? No. Just no. Total and complete waste of time.
I use Twitter reluctantly, and feel it’s “meh” at best. I can understand how Costolo would welcome this as the platform needs all the help it can get with no signs of profitability nor acquisition on the horizon.
There’s a feature I’ll be turning off. I don’t give a crap about finding tweets when I go searching for something in Spotlight.