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Twitter integrated into iOS 5 with MediaStream?

Seth Weintraub | May 31 2011 - 4:27 pm PT

Techcrunch and DaringFireball are talking up Twitter integration into iOS 5 with the following passages:

We’ve heard from multiple sources that Twitter is likely to have a big-time partner for such a service: Apple. Specifically, we’re hearing that Apple’s new iOS 5 will come with an option to share images to Twitter baked into the OS. This would be similar to the way you can currently share videos on YouTube with one click in iOS. Obviously, a user would have to enable this feature by logging in with their Twitter credentials in iOS. There would then be a “Send to Twitter” option for pictures stored on your device.

and

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.

… respectively. What’ most interesting is how much this sounds like an integrated iOS service we detailed in January called MediaStream and a subset service called PhotoStream that…

From the looks of different alerts and plists, it appears that Apple will let iPhone users set up “Photo Streams” that friends could “subscribe” to. Also, it looks like there will be some privacy preferences related to this, so you can choose who is allowed to view your “Streams.”

With Photo Streams, you will also be allowed to “invite” other users to view your pictures as you take them and upload them to a service. This service looks like it is connected to MobileMe, and we speculate that “Media Stream” can be directly connected to “Find my Friends.” We think Find my Friends will be another aspect of Apple’s social network, a part of a free MobileMe, where you can choose to view your friends’ “Photo Streams” all on that same map. Apple has a patent on something called iGroups relating to this. This would clearly tie into the Mac and iOS photo app’s Places feature. From looking at the SDK, it looks like “Media Stream” could very well also have a plugin counterpart, like AirPlay, in 3rd party apps.

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