Apple Just Handed Twitter The Keys To The iOS Kingdom — Here’s Twitter’s Take

When we first broke the news that iOS 5 would come with Twitter integration, I wasn’t thinking big enough. Based on the fairly vague (but credible) information I had, I figured it was mainly based around the Twitter Photos product which Twitter was rushing to get out in time. Turns out it goes much, much deeper. Apple has essentially baked a “Twitter Connect” into iOS 5. It’s something that all iOS apps will be able to easily use.

And they should. And they likely will.

It’s a massive win for Twitter. And a smart move by Apple. Social is not at their core, and they know it (*cough* Ping *cough*). So they partnered with a company that gets it. But what does it mean for the Twitter ecosystem? After days of dodging my questions, I finally got a chance to talk with Twitter’s head of platform, Ryan Sarver, about it this afternoon.

The New Early-Adopter Addiction: Turntable

Signing up for Twitter at South by Southwest 2007, I can remember those feelings of “Wow, this is going to be big.” That instant feeling of knowing you’re seeing the future and the world doesn’t even have a clue yet. It’d be years before my friends would finally take the leap and get their own Twitter accounts (even if I knew Twitter usernames in 2007 were like domain names in 1995).

There have been other services I’ve thought would be big, but only one other time in the past four years have I been awe-struck. That other moment was earlier this year (SXSW 2011) when Foursquare unveiled v3 with the “Explore” functionality—I knew that was a life-changer. I’ve dug Foursquare since the early days, but this third version is where it became obvious that every person in the world would benefit from using this service.

The third magical “wow” moment just happened this week, and it’s Turntable.fm. The early adopting tech elites are eating this site up, just as they did Twitter, Foursquare, Instagram, and others. Barring some awful interference, this app is going to break big and change things.

Twitter Now Automatically Shortens Links

In another step towards filling all its holes, Twitter has just announced its own link shortening service which starts rolling out today. The Twitter link shortening service will pass through t.co and shorten links to 19 characters, still allowing users to see what site the links are pointing towards.

In an afterthought, Twitter users are still referred to third party apps like Bit.ly if they want analytics surrounding their links. [Insert well-trodden assertion that Twitter is breaking the hearts of its developer ecosystem here.]

Report: Twitter to launch own photo sharing

 
                 It looks like Twitter's recent app expansion effort might just be getting started.

The microblogging site is getting ready to announce its own photo-sharing service this week, according to a TechCrunch report that cited multiple anonymous sources.

Twitter users can already share photos on their Twitter streams via Twitpic and Yfrog, but as the report noted, a built-in service would have a significant advantage over competing apps.

The site is also close to acquiring AdGrok, a platform for bidding on keywords on Google AdWords, for less than $10 million, according to a separate TechCrunch report citing multiple sources.

Twitter's official media relations feed had no comment on the reports.

Twitter confirmed on Wednesday it would acquire the popular desktop client TweetDeck for $40 million.