Twitter est le nouveau Facebook

Following a whirlwind week and a half of product announcements, you can throw Twitter’s attempts to differentiate itself as an “information network” out the window — there is little doubt the company is now entrenched in serious competition with Facebook for the much grander social networking crown.

After announcing that it would finally be bringing native photo and video sharing to its service on June 1, Twitter’s biggest product win to-date came on Tuesday, when Apple announced that iOS 5 would include deep Twitter integration.

That means that the 200 million plus people with iPhones, iPads and iPod Touch devices (or at least the tens of millions able to upgrade to iOS 5) will have the ability to do things like post photos, videos and links to Twitter with a single tap.

Application developers will also be able to add this type of functionality to their iOS applications, further accelerating the impact of the partnership.

In summarizing the significance of that, my Mashable colleague Jennifer Van Grove wrote, “[Twitter] will soon be the social layer of iOS, enabling users to turn individual actions such as snapping a photo or reading an article into instant social activities.”

For Facebook, who has long positioned itself as the social graph of the Web (and in turn mobile), that’s a big blow.

Bien sûr, application developers can still build Facebook integration into their iOS apps, but by making Twitter the default in apps like Camera, Safari and YouTube, Apple a dicté où des millions de morceaux de contenu seront toujours circuler.

À la fois, en ajoutant la photo d'origine et le partage de vidéos et le déplacement des personnes sur ses propres clients Web et des expériences, Twitter est positionné comme jamais auparavant à capitaliser sur ce contenu et garder les gens sur son site, et en défi de tour Facebook où il domine pas comme les autres: Engagement.

Au début de cette année, Hitwise signalé que l'utilisateur moyen de Facebook passe un impressionnant de quatre heures et 35 minutes par mois sur le site, plus que toute autre propriété sur le Web, et plus du double mensuels deux heures l'utilisateur moyen et Twitter 12 procès-verbal.

Mais maintenant que Twitter est lui-même en train de devenir un réseau social, cela pourrait bientôt changer. Au lieu de créer et de consommer des photos et des vidéos sur des sites tiers — something that’s already hugely popular on Twitter and is Facebook’s No. 1 time sink — users will be doing it on Twitter.com.

Add to that the fact that Twitter now owns the most popular third-party client (TweetDeck) and has been systematically eating away at the ecosystem it enabled, and the numbers quickly add up.

The icing on the cake, bien sûr, is the iOS tie-up, which for now gives Twitter priority seating over Facebook with tens of millions of highly engaged mobile users.

Certes, Facebook could also do a deal with Apple before iOS 5 rolls out this fall, but it’s unclear what kind of relationship those companies have following last year’s contentious split over Ping.

For the moment, Twitter’s iOS win is a symbolic victory over Facebook that signals the company’s growing ambitions as a social network.

In the long-run, cependant, it could very much be the partnership that helps move Twitter from Facebook’s distant cousin to its arch rival.

Source: CNN