From TechCrunch…

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.

Does this seem odd to you?  It should.  Building someone else’s product into your operating system without any quid pro quo arrangement is pretty unheard of.  I’m not sure I can think of a single example of this happening in the past.  But when you think about it from a strategic standpoint it’s actually pretty brilliant. 

You see Apple is behind in the social realm.  In fact they’re WAY behind.   I’d argue they’re so behind that execution alone won’t catch them up.  In order for Apple to catch up, the market leader (Facebook) will have to stumble. 

But here’s where Apple is lucky.  Facebook has already stumbled.  They missed Twitter’s appeal and though they’ve tried to catch up with their Status Updates it hasn’t worked yet.  Apple obviously sees this and is endeavoring to make it worse.  

For a second let us look at what Facebook does.  It allows users to connect with each other by letting them share things easily.  Be it Text Updates, Photos, Interesting Links, or whatever.  People visit Facebook to see what their friends have shared. 

So to cripple Facebook you’d need to leverage their one weakness (text updates) in a way that causes other weaknesses to spring up.  Which is exactly what Apple is trying to do.  By making it easy for users to share other things on Twitter they have a very real shot at depriving Facebook of the updates that keep it alive.  

Look at the official post on the Twitter Blog…

Twitter has always been the best way to instantly share whatever is happening around you, and everything you're interested in, anywhere you are. And today we're working with Apple to make sharing on Twitter even easier: Twitter is built right into iOS 5, coming soon to iPhone, iPad and iPod touch devices worldwide.
This means that you’ll be able to sign in to your Twitter account once and then tweet with a single tap from Twitter-enabled apps, including Apple’s apps—Camera, Photos, Safari, Contacts, YouTube, and Maps. And developers of all of your favorite apps can easily take advantage of the single sign-on capability, letting you tweet directly from their apps too.

Notice it isn’t “keep in touch” anymore.  It’s “instantly share whatever is happening around you”. 

But there’s more.  Once iOS users start posting to Twitter exclusively they’ll draw their non-iOS users in.  The beauty of doing this with Twitter is it doesn’t benefit Apple directly.  Google wants Facebook to go away too.  Since Twitter isn’t owned by Apple there’s no harm in pushing Twitter integration for Android.   In fact the apps already exist. 

So while integrating Twitter into iOS is an odd move it’s a very strategic one.  It exacerbates Facebook’s weakness by empowering the company’s chief competitor.  If Apple can get its customers to post all their updates, photos, and web links to Twitter it will be a crippling blow to Facebook.