Apple Getting Serious About Social Media, Plans to Integrate Media Sharing Into iPhones

Apple has just released a new beta for iOS 4.3. But what is interesting in the file system of this new release is the folder titled "Media Stream". The Media Stream folder contains a lot of information about "Photo Streaming", which might be an upcoming social feature integrated into the all iOS devices. 9 to 5 Mac, who has dugged this information, thinks that soon Apple will let iPhone users set up "Photo Streams" that friends could subscribe to. iPhone users would be able to invite friends or other users to view their photos as they shoot and upload them. In addition to this, the file system also provides hints about the privacy preferences that would be built into the streams. Users would be able to set up privacy levels, there by controlling who is allowed to view what streams. 9 to 5 Mac further conjectures that: 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. For the time being the features of Media Stream have been limited to Photo Streaming, and the file system has no mentions of complete Media Streaming features, which includes video, audio and textual sharing and streaming. However, from the naming of the file system, it looks obvious that Apple has big plans regarding social sharing up its sleeves and this move would include all forms of sharing, that the users have come to play with on social sites like Facebook. It is reasonable to believe that Apple would have to deploy immense data storage infrastructure in order to support the storage of all this data that potential iPhone users would be uploading and sharing. This might be one aspect of Apples plans for which it might be building its Cloud Infrastructure. The social media functionality that Apple might be working on, could be an attempt to respond to Google's upcoming streaming media services for Android devices. Apple has not officially disclosed the existence of these features, and the features seems to be half backed for the time being. All this leads us to believe that the Media Streaming functionality wont see the light of day before iOS 5. But the ambition of integrating social sharing into iPhones, plans to build up cloud infrastructure for all the media that would be shared etc all points to the fact that the Apple has developed a real serious social media roadmap this time around and that this wont be the same half hearted attempt as was obvious in case of Ping.

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Apple Getting Serious About Social Media, Plans to Integrate Media Sharing Into iPhones

Bilal Hameed

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Bilal Hameed