Ask HN: How does Apple gain from iOS5 Twitter integration?

Do they perceive Facebook as being too aligned with Microsoft?

Apple gets a social messaging backplane for essentially free while Google struggles with building their own. Strategically this puts them ahead of GOOG and AMZN and on better footing with Facebook.

Apple has previously tried to do a deal with Facebook to presumably implement similar features - those negotiations weren't fruitful, perhaps a stroke of good luck for both Twitter (#2 in the space) and Apple (Twitter less likely to be a competitive threat to Apple).

In some respects this is dangerous for Twitter too. If Apple users get used to these features and use them appreciably, Apple may move to re-implement on their own platform a la iMessage (a replacement for carrier SMS). The smart guys at Twitter probably have a pretty good understanding of how this commodifies some of their platform and how to manage that over the long term.

/r

I think this is another "make the platform better" move more than anything else. My biggest gripe with every new app is the "Sign in to Twitter to share" button and off late I have stopped doing that. This feature now lets developers use a simpler API to allow sharing while removing the hassle to end users. Again this is one of the features I love in Android where any application just sends a "share" intent and other installed apps can respond to it, allowing app content to be sharable beyond the services the developer could have imagined.

Facebook and Apple have tried to negotiate something for a long time now and both have had a hard time coming to an agreement on working together so it's not that Apple doesn't want to integrate with Facebook but rather more than likely nothing has been hashed out on terms both sides could agree to.

As for what Apple stands to gain? I don't know for sure but it would be a good experiment for them to see how many people would use a social feature like twitter when integrated and how people socialize and leverage that data both for learning how to improve their own social elements as well as maybe strike a monetary deal later. Who knows. It's too difficult to speculate. For all we know, its just good UX that could draw in more love for Apple products.

Twitter is much more 2D (right word?), you can get away with just implementing sharing/tweeting, but if iOS could only post statuses/links/pictures it wouldn't be enough.

Apple gets leverage over Facebook they next time they want to talk. This could also be a shot against a future Facebook flavored release of Android.