Unless you were under a rock this week, you definitely heard that Apple announced its latest iPhone, the iPhone 5. Most of the design updates and functionality additions were revealed as predicted. One of these functionality additions was the integration of frictionless Facebook sharing into phone activities.

Image source: Apple

This means that you will be able to post pictures straight from your camera, share your location from maps, like a song or an app from iTunes and Siri can update your Facebook status for you. This also means that when you are in iTunes or the App Store, you will be able to see if any of your friends have already liked that song or app, thereby helping you decide if it is worth your time and money. This integration of Facebook into the iOS is more technologically advanced than ever before.

The Good

Considering this strong integration and the fact that the sales of iPhone 5 models could be so high as to boost the fourth quarter GDP economy by 0.5%, Facebook should be really pleased: the already popular social site now has the opportunity to drive even more activity on the site and maintain its relevance among its competitors as they are all competing for users’ time while more and more social sharing sites are popping up and gaining popularity. Facebook’s stock value even increased with the announcement of the iPhone 5.

It is a win for Apple, too: sharing purchases to Facebook could naturally drive more friend traffic back to the iTunes and App stores and likely result in purchases and more sharing. Though Apple tried to create their own social sharing through iTunes with Ping, the service never took off; and with the new Facebook integration, Apple has decided to discontinue Ping.

For brands looking to engage with users on Facebook, asking their followers to share content from the brand experiences, share their location and download their apps just became a lot easier.

The Bad

With sharing so easy, users could easily share more than they want resulting in embarrassing situations or share overload for their friends and family with news stream traffic.

For brands that field customer service issues through Facebook, with sharing even easier they could see an increase in service conversations instead of relevant positive engagements.

Whether people use the feature or not remains to be seen, but there is no doubt that the new iPhone 5 will have a lot of people to try it out: the pre-order inventory sold out within one hour of being available for purchase online during the wee hours of the night last night. The new phones will hit the hands of consumers next Friday, September 21st.