If Passbook is the secret payload in iOS 6 like I suspect, Facebook integration is the more obvious time bomb. Apple has proven in the past that putting social networks deeply into its products results in a big bump: When it added Twitter to iOS in iOS 5, it boosted monthly sign-ups by 25%.
Facebook has a lot more users to begin with, so the new sign-ups its inclusion in iOS will deliver isn’t likely to be quite as statistically significant. But the Facebook integration isn’t about user acquisition, it’s about engagement. System-level sharing available to all apps is a huge boon for Facebook’s social graph-building efforts. And for users, it’s a great convenience feature.
Developers will now be able to build apps that can post status updates, and share photos directly fo Facebook. Once you associate your account via Settings, you can also update via Siri or Notification Center, and it can sync your contact info with your Facebook graph.
That provides Facebook with the opportunity to track and capture a huge amount of potential new actions. Users do a huge amount of their social sharing, media consumption and more on their mobile devices, and built-in Facebook support means it’ll be that much easier for users to involve Facebook in that process.
At Disrupt yesterday, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg talked about the importance of mobile to his company’s future. iOS 6 integration is like a bullet train straight to its destination in terms of increasing the likelihood of mobile engagement for its network.
- APPLE
Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 845 million monthly active users.
Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks.
The original…
→ Learn more
Started by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne, Apple has expanded from computers to consumer electronics over the last 30 years, officially changing their name from Apple Computer, Inc. to Apple, Inc. in January 2007.
Among the key offerings from Apple’s product line are: Pro line laptops (MacBook Pro) and desktops (Mac Pro), consumer line laptops (MacBook Air) and desktops (iMac), servers (Xserve), Apple TV, the Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server operating systems, the iPod, the…
→ Learn more