Another intriguing fossil unearthed from the second iOS 4.3 beta is the mention of two new services called Media Stream and Photo Stream, which 9 to 5 Mac’s Marc Gurman speculates is meant to be just one more element of an eventual Apple-run social network which will debut in iOS 5.
With Photo Streams, you will also be allowed to invite” other users to view your pictures as you take them and upload them to a service. This service looks like it is connected to MobileMe, and we speculate that Media Stream can be directly connected to Find my Friends. We think Find my Friends will be another aspect of Apples social network, a part of a free MobileMe, where you can choose to view your friends Photo Streams all on that same map.
Text found inside the iOS 4.3 beta, though, paints a more modest picture of Photo and Media Stream:
Photo Stream uploads and stores the last thirty days of your photos on MobileMe and downloads them to all of your devices.
In other words, Photo Stream and Media Stream is just one of the many ways in which MobileMe, according to Steve Jobs’ promises, is slated to get better this year. Facebook probably doesn’t need to worry about Apple running up the flags and launching their first broadside just yet.
Personally, I think it’s more likely that this is Apple’s first gambit with the cloud. Media Streaming, in particular, sounds like the kind of thing that might leverage Apple’s NC Data Center and its recently acquired LaLa technology.
