When in doubt, add functionality.
Per the Wall Street Journal, Apple is expected to upgrade its iCloud service with new photo sharing functionality at this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference in June.
The new features will reportedly be announced when WWDC kicks off on June 11 and the new functionality will allow users to share photos with others and also comment on them.
That’s a major improvement from the current Photo Stream functionality in iCloud, which simply syncs pictures across devices rather than giving users the ability upload and share them publicly or with friends.
If true, the new photo sharing functionality would be another attempt at social networking on the part of Apple. The company launched a social networking component of iTunes with Ping in 2010, but that effort has largely failed to gain traction despite integration with Twitter.
Monday’s report also reaffirmed that Apple is planning to add support for synced Notes and Reminders to an upgraded iCloud.com website. Apple itself tipped its hand to those upgrades last week, when the site beta.icloud.com was temporarily accessible to the public.
Last week Apple’s regular iCloud.com site also showed a test banner notification to users, suggesting that feature is also in the works for the iCloud website. Monday’s report made no mention of Web-based notification syncing for iCloud.
Apple will show off the future of both iOS and OS X at WWDC when it kicks off on June 11 in San Francisco, Calif. The company is expected to reveal more about this summer’s OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion update, and also unveil iOS 6 for iPhone and iPad.
Stay tuned for additional details as they become available.