Apple has been on a social networking kick lately, what with Twitter's footings in iOS 5 and OS X Mountain Lion as well as Facebook's upcoming presence in iOS 6. From what the New York Times hears, that fascination could become more of a fixation. The company has reportedly chatted with Twitter in past months about the possibility of investing money on the scale you'd normally expect from a later-stage venture capitalist: the newspaper is talking "hundreds of millions" of dollars based on Twitter being valued at more than $10 billion. Any such deal would be less about funding (Twitter purportedly has $600 million-plus in the bank) and more about getting cozy in a social world where Apple still has some learning to do.