OS X Mountain Lion has an under-the-hood, native way to share pictures and videos via Twitter, Flickr and Vimeo on top of the (what will be) usual suspects: email, AirDrop or Messages.
An interesting point has been raised by pocket lint in a post about the fact that YouTube is a notable omission from this sharing feature. The response from Apple to pocketlint was, “We have Vimeo, and we don’t have YouTube.” John Gruber translates that statement elegantly with the words “fuck Google.”
It is possible that Apple are deliberately promoting Vimeo over YouTube just to piss on Google. Though why not made a Vimeo app over a YouTube app in iOS? It would be a bigger statement to remove that YouTube app than to just omit YouTube from their sharing feature.
Of course Mountain Lion isn’t out for a few months so YouTube could arrive later on, but I wouldn’t count on it unless Google can do some convincing.
I think there are two other things that could be considered in this…
* Google offered Mozilla a lot of money to keep its search engine as the default in FireFox, and perhaps Apple doesn’t want to give Google a free ride…
* Flickr (owned by a struggling Yahoo), Vimeo and Twitter are all companies that have been linked, via rumours, as potential targets for Apple to purchase. It’s not completely out of the question that Apple are lining up companies as friends before trying to buy them… thus ensuring everything in their delicate eco-system is theirs.
