Wednesday, May 6, 2009    Text size: 

The rumor meme already has its own handle, "Twapple," and was first mentioned over at New York gossip blog Gawker.com and has since gained some traction online.

What would such a deal look like, and how might it affect the adult industry? According to Gawker's Owen Thomas, the mighty iPhone would be the key to the deal.

"What does Twitter, an adorable but unprofitable startup, have to do with a hardware company like Apple? The iPhone is the obvious driver of the deal," he said.

Presumably, Apple would want to formally incorporate Twitter functionality into the iPhone, which already has several Twitter apps available for it. The importance to the adult industry relates to Twitter's sheer popularity among industry members.

For perspective, the website PornStarTweet.com aggregates Twitter activity from performers across the industry. There's a lot of it.

Peter Housley runs PornStarTweet via his company NaughtyTweet.com, which also hosts four other Twitter aggregating sites. Housley told XBIZ that despite Twitter's popularity, most avid Twitter users don't actually dial up the URL Twitter.com, instead opting for services like TweetTree.com, Splitweet.com, Seesmic.com or TweetDeck.com.

Housley also noted the popularity of Twitter apps on the iPhone, adding that using Twitter while on the go plays into the site's central question, "What are you doing?"

But does this story have legs? PCMag.com expressed skepticism about the rumor, noting that all reports about it reference a single shadowy source. Tech pundit of Kara Swisher of the blog AllThingsD.com went even further and laid out a detailed argument debunking the rumor.

"In point of fact, talks with Facebook last year were actually the only truly deep sale discussions that Twitter has been involved in, and those went south," she said. "Oh, the very notion of Apple and Twitter is a techmeme dream-ticket, sure to be chewed over for days on end."