Does iTunes 9 Facebook and Twitter integration mean anything significant?

If you haven’t installed iTunes 9 yet, I recommend you head to Software Updater on your Mac and do so. It offers a variety of user interface improvements, as well as a couple new features. Included in those features is Twitter and Facebook integration. By this, I mean that iTunes users can now right click on the arrow to the right of a song or album and click either “Share on Twitter” or “Share on Facebook” to tell all of their friends about it. But what does this mean?

On the outside, it certainly means Apple is taking a step towards integration into some of today’s popular social networks. While I’m sure this will help drive some sales to iTunes music, I don’t see it as being anything absolutely groundbreaking in terms of functionality; users could’ve always just copied and pasted the link themselves. This just makes that easier. However, it is interesting in that it shows that Apple is now becoming more active with social media in one of their core products. It is great to see such a large company embracing the power of these tools, even if in such a simple way.