Late last week, The New York Times reported that Apple and Twitter had had discussions "in recent months" about Apple making a significant investment of several hundred million dollars in Twitter, but The Wall Street Journal and other sources moved quickly to downplay the rumor with claims that the talks had taken place over a year ago and did not lead to any serious consideration of an investment.
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The Wall Street Journal now follows up with more details on the discussions between the two companies, noting that they were primarily focused on product integration such as appeared in iOS 5 last year and OS X Mountain Lion just last week.
Apple Inc. floated the idea of investing in Twitter Inc. as the companies discussed integrating the social service into Apple’s mobile operating system last year, according to people familiar with the discussions.
Apple floated the idea at the time and it didn’t progress into serious discussions or negotiations, this person and other people familiar with the matter said.
The report notes that Apple and Twitter continue to work closely together as they explore additional ways in which their products can be integrated, with iTunes being one of the areas where the two companies believe Twitter can have a larger presence as Apple moves to phase out its own Ping social network for music.
Apple and Twitter remain tight and continue to talk about future product integrations. They include more deeply melding Twitter and iTunes, according to two people briefed on the matter.
While Apple and Twitter were able to move forward relatively quickly on product integration, negotiations between Apple and Facebook have proceeded somewhat more slowly. Those two companies do, however, appear to have ironed out their differences, with Facebook integration set to come to iOS 6 and OS X Mountain Lion later this year.
Top Rated Comments
I have a great suggestion for apple. How about focussing on getting some quality professional desktops out to your long time users. I have been using and praising apple products for over 18 years. I went through all their tribulations. They care more about stupid twitter crap and swiping through tabs on web browsers than actually writing decent graphic drivers and building machines that don't contain 2-3 year old hardware laptop parts in them.
It is getting bad for professionals. Very bad.
Stop with social, Apple! Please?
I am sick and tired of this attitude.
You don't seem to get it. We don't care if we don't see it. The problem is that Apple has a habit of putting things in places that you can't remove (or you can't remove without Terminal.app incantations first).
This is what annoys us, the fact that we're just trying to use our computers every day and we're being blasted with buttons and widgets in opportune placements that are impossible to avoid.
We haven't logged into anything. We don't intend on logging into anything. Yet the UI controls are still omnipresent, irregardless of our initial choice to try and ignore the stuff.
This "social networking creep" is what we're whining about. The fact that we're being pressured into something we do not want, because it's good for Apple's profit (even though we paid a premium for our machines).
Ping was one of the most obtrusive things I've ever seen in iTunes, even though I never logged into it and never even had an account under it. That goddam "Ping" drop-down menu was ALWAYS present in iTunes unless you started typing random crap into Terminal.app to kill it.
So once again, we're not whining about options. Options are good, I'm all for options.
We're whining about options that we have not opted into, but are being persistently reminded of regardless.
-SC
I think that the complaint is that Apple is focusing so many resources on children buy-in that they are ignoring the professionals and power users that use Apple products for business and serious needs. Like where's my new Mac Pro?