Regardless of whether you are the type of person who fully embraces the social network culture and repeatedly update your status and timelines, or the type of person who totally disagrees with broadcasting your every move while waking through the world, the fact is that Facebook and Twitter are big business and are undoubtedly here to stay. With the public launch of iOS 5 last October, we saw the first steps of a social trend, with Apple integrating Twitter into iOS and allowing system-wide sharing of information directly to the service.
The rumor mill has been spinning furiously over the last couple of weeks, with those in the know generally accepting that Apple will announce some kind of Facebook integration into iOS 6 at the up and coming Worldwide Developers Conference at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. In all honesty, it seems extremely likely that the next major release of iOS will come with a Facebook presence, but the question remains; just how deep this integration will be? Tim Cook pretty much confirmed the partnership at the D10 conference with his public praising of the social network, along with his “stay tuned” teaser, but it looks as though we could be seeing an implementation similar to Twitter, with vast system-wide Facebook support.
With the current generation iPhone being an extremely rich media device, we expect the iPhone 5 to take that to the next level, with Facebook integration being a part of that and giving users the ability to post images directly to their account. It is also likely that the ability to post directly to Facebook will also be available in a number of additional stock apps such as YouTube to allow on-the-fly sharing of information. As we mentioned in a previous article, iOS 6 is also set to bring about an overhaul of the App Store, with Apple supposedly wanting to improve application visibility, something that greatly needs improving, considering the store itself is a jungle to over half a million apps.
Whether or not Apple sees a resolution to the visibility problem coming from the fact that Facebook has over 900 million members is anyone’s guess, but logic would dictate that if any partnership with Zuckerberg’s creation is going ahead, then being able to share apps with Facebook or ‘Like’ them would be a fairly large part of not only the deal, but, also the redesign of the App Store. We really won’t know the intricate details until Tim Cook and his team take to the stage in San Francisco at WWDC, but an advanced socially aware mobile OS can only be a good thing for users in my opinion.
(via 9to5Mac)
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