With great fanfare, iOS 5 was unveiled at the WWDC 2011 in San Francisco today. One of the
notable features announced - among many others like iMessage which marks, in more ways then one, the end of the widely popular Blackberry's BBM - is the takeover by Twitter of the email function in iOS 5.
So far, pretty much anywhere on iOS stock apps, a button to share a screen, link or photo via email was never far away. Well as of this fall, email will no longer be the lone iOS link to the outside world from your idevice... Make some room, email, and say hello to my new little friend: Twitter!
If Facebook has conquered the web with its "like" button, Twitter is not content just following suit with a mirroring "Tweet" button; it is also conquering the very tools we all use to access the Web. But iOS 5 is not Twitter's first pass at flirting with and embedding itself in a tool.
Firefox has already said 'yes' to Twitter by providing a very neat add-on that allows you to not just type a @username in the search bar and get the corresponding Twitter profile automatically, but also allows you to type a #hashtag in to automatically get all tweets tagged with that hashtag.
If you use Firefox, you can get Twitter's official add-on here. Do note in passing, that this Twitter move will add to the list of casualties it has already caused. Take a look at Twitpic, Twitvid and other Firefox tweeting helpers while they're still alive. It's not just for kicks that Twitter has taken advantage of the launch of its very own photo and video sharing service (in partnership with photobucket) to push the use of hashtags, and is going so far as to suggest that a hashtag is worth more words than a picture: 1,000,000 to be exact.
Firefox and Twitter: Just Married
All clear signs that Twitter is, in my mind, going about conquering the web a bit more smartly - some might say insidiously - than Facebook, who has yet to show such 'physical' integration with the tools we use to access the web everyday.
What do you think of Twitter's approach? Why do you think Facebook has not adopted a similar tack?
... Not that it probably won't soon now.
