Watch Out Facebook Connect, Apple Pushes Twitter Sign-Ins In iOS 5


Apple just announced a fairly in-depth ‘Twitterification’ of the newest version of its mobile OS, iOS 5 (which we reported last week to be taking place). As Apple says during the WWDC keynote today, there are 1 billion Tweets per week now and we want to make it even easier for all our customers to use Twitter in our iOS products.

Now Apple provides a single sign-on for Twitter use on the phone, and with any app you download, it will just ask you for Twitter credential permission. There’s no need to re login. Apple has taken it a step further to integrate Twitter into many of its own features and applications like camera and photos. You can also Tweet articles and content directly from Safari, Maps, videos from YouTube, etc and add location as well. And Twitter photos and @usernames can be autopulled into the phone’s contacts.

Here’s a link to Twitter’s announcement of the integration. As Twitter notes, the feature will soon be arriving on iOS 5 iPhone, iPad and iPod touch devices. Developers will also be able to take advantage of single sign-on capability, letting you tweet directly from their apps too, says Twitter.

The important point here is that Apple iOS 5 is using Twitter xAuth, which is going to give Twitter a huge push as a sign-in system. One sign-in system that Apple noticeably did not integrate with is Facebook Connect. This is a huge win for Twitter sign-on over Facebook Connect as a defacto social log-in. Facebook’s sign-in system has been steadily taking over as the major sign-in on the web.

Apple has deals with Facebook and Flickr for iPhoto, but no word yet on any partnerships for the in-depth integration that Twitter has with iOS 5.

Apple’s choice of Twitter for this in-depth integration fits in nicely with Twitter’s recent rollout of its own-photo sharing service. Surely, the ability to take a Photo and Tweet directly from the camera app should help increase usage of its photo-sharing feature.