Siri is a “personal assistant” for your iPhone 4S, and is completely accessed through voice recognition. According to Apple during their keynote, you can ask Siri just about anything and receive an answer. Here’s the AI explaining what she is:

User: Siri, what are you?

Siri: I am a humble personal assistant

The idea of asking Siri questions has led to entertaining tweets, such as:

Along with the tweets poking fun at Siri, many have been questioning whether or not Siri is a strong enough headline feature to purchase an iPhone 4S. As with all announcements of this magnitude, many have been cheering for Siri and will buy the new handset on release date. Others are skeptical of the feature and question how it will work in noisy locations, and just how useful it will be.

While all this may be protesting too much from both parties, sources are now saying that Twitter CEO Evan Williams wouldn’t sell for a billion dollars, four times what Google is rumored to have placed the microblogging service’s value at.

When it comes to Internet businesses, though, Twitter needs to remember that timing is everything. If their endgame is acquisition, there are a few points they might want to keep in mind:

• the economy is down
• the mainstream (and less mainstream) media hasn’t yet turned on Twitter (as it has with previous darlings, including MySpace and Facebook)
• Twitter doesn’t have a (publicly-discussed) business model

Google has, of course, paid top-dollar for big-ticket properties before. But although its biggest purchase, the $1.65B YouTube, continues to dominate its niche, Google is still struggling to monetize the most popular video site in the world. Are they prepared to take a chance on another service that doesn’t have a concrete way to turn a profit?

BoomTown’s Kara Swisher points out that Twitter could well be worth the price tag—with one caveat:

It is clear that it is onto something significant and perhaps even something quite profitable someday.

That is, providing its execs focus on what’s important—building Twitter’s business and audience—and trying as hard as they can to ignore all the noisy and pointless tweeting from and about its many suitors.

If they can’t, though—and it would be a crying shame—they should just start responding to all those pretty swains and sell out to the highest and most attractive bidder.

Personally, I am hoping they pick the former, as Twitter is turning out to be yet another of Silicon Valley’s great stories of possibility and promise.

Personally, I think it’s a bit soon to say that about Twitter (I Tweet, but I haven’t drunk the Kool aid yet—I could take it or leave it). I think the company’s hype is influencing this (ahem, timing). Back in February, she made a bit more evenhanded assessment:

Twitter—while it says it is poised on the verge of announcing its grand plan to make money—is operating in an arena I have seen many other shooting stars in, traversing a very dangerous crevasse of hype and expectation.

Due to that, it has a very big red target on its back, one that a competitor in the status space—such as the spurned Facebook, whose update business is much bigger—will not ignore.

Right now, Twitter could ask for a lot, as one of the only Web 2.0 companies that everyone is uniformly excited about.

That’s one I can agreement. Right now, Twitter could ask for a lot. But I hope they’ve seen examples of other media-sweetheart social companies holding out for top dollar—only to end up losing their valuation momentum.

What do you think? Should Twitter hold out for either a higher price tag or a viable business model (which would probably garner a higher price tag anyway), or should they take what they can get now?

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Frustrated with the need to send people a link to shared items in Google Reader? Got plenty of friends using Gmail or Google Talk? Well pal, Chrix Finne at Google has a deal for you!

Finne wrote at the Google Reader blog about the new feature. Items that a user of Google Reader marks for sharing automatically makes it to a list of "Friends’ shared items" in Google Talk.

Most users of Google Reader likely found out about this the same way we did, by logging in to Google Reader and seeing the notice that Google has helpfully made this change. That would be really great, unless of course one has contacts in Google Talk that one normally does not share stories with from their Reader feeds.

Oops.

However, Finne noted that Google helpfully included an option to clear items shared in the past, so they don’t show up in that Friends’ shared items area.

That’s good.

If one doesn’t want a friend in Gmail or Google Talk to see shared items, the Settings -> Friends tab in Google Reader allows for hiding shared items from friends as desired.

Also good.

But this is a feature Finne and company should have made an opt-in on Reader, by allowing the Reader user to unhide shared items from friends instead of sharing them by default and making the user clear items or hide them.

That’s bad.

Imagine opening up one’s Gmail, seeing a spouse’s shared list, and there are items related to divorce or relocating that the spouse has shared under the previous Reader function with trusted friends.

The result could be unpleasant; Google needs to think real-world impact through before going "taa-daa" with one’s information.

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If you’ve done even the smallest amount of marketing the video above should make you laugh. It’s also got a lot of truth inside about how not to market. How are you turning your business into a two-way street? What are you doing to build relationships?

1. Do you listen to your customers?
2. Do you give them a chance to talk to you?
3. Is your business a monologue or a dialog?
4. Do you know where your customers spend their time?
5. Do you spend time there?
6. Are you sincere?
7. Do you see customers real people or statistics?
8. Do you give your customers what they want or what you want them to want?

My apologies for the light posting of late. A busy week working for clients and a little bit of business re-evaluation have put the blog on the back burner the last few days. It’s only temporary.

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Microsoft added northpole@live.com last year to its Windows Live Messenger, which encouraged kids to connect directly to Santa. The program asks children what they want for Christmas and can respond to their requests.

The UK based, The Register reported that one of its readers discovered that a chat between Santa and his young nieces about eating pizza made Santa talk about oral sex. After turning down requests to eat pizza the bad Santa replied with, "You want me to eat what?!? It’s fun to talk about oral sex, but I want to chat about something else."

Microsoft admitted the problem and said, "Yesterday we received reports that the automated Santa Claus agent in Windows Live Messenger used inappropriate language. As soon as we were alerted we took steps to mitigate the issue, including removal of language from the agent’s automated script.

We were not completely satisfied with the result of these actions, and have decide to discontinue the automated Santa Claus agent."

Microsoft spokesman Adam Sohn said the company was not aware that the Santa code included foul language and that the company did not believe it to be an employee prank.

So, if you wanted to use every part of eBay’s empire, like Skype, PayPal, StumbleUpon, etc, you’d need to sign in 21 different times.

Needless to say he, and others at eBay, are working on solving that problem.

Why did I meet up with Dan Pritchett? Because of a speech by Tim Berners Lee, the guy who invented the Web. No, Al Gore didn’t do that. Heh.

Anyway, we’ll have the videos of Tim’s talk up tomorrow. He’s thinking a lot about how to take the Web further and is working on Web research — but I’ll just let you read his blog to learn more about that. CNET has a report up of the talk he gave.

One thing I noticed is that during the talk he spent a lot of time talking about social behaviors of people. He’s clearly been studying the blog world and the social networking worlds and had a good answer to my question about what Facebook should look like in five years.

Another thing I noticed? It’s really great to be able to hear from smart people directly without having to go through intermediaries or filters anymore.

Anyway, back to the headline. How many identity systems and social networks do we need? How are we going to join them all together? I know I’m on Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Yelp, Upcoming, etc. etc. etc. — I wish they all talked with each other and all used the same sign on. Memorizing passwords is a real PITA.

Good luck to eBay and others in the efforts to join their systems together. That’s going to be some tough engineering (and political) work.

See ya tomorrow with the videos.

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This is neither; although we didn’t know it was going to happen, it’s actually quite logical that the Google Talk Gadget would gain support for 19 more languages.

Google puts the number at 20, yet I’m standing by my belief that “English (UK)” really isn’t all that different from what we Americans speak. 

The true 19 languages, then, are Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, and Vietnamese.

If you want to use the Google Talk Gadget in one of these languages (or just want to see what it looks like), the company’s own Katya Rogers provided instructions on the Google Talkabout blog. 

“To access the Google Talk Gadget in your language, go to the Google Talk homepage, select your language in the drop-down menu in the top right, and click on the ‘launch Google Talk Gadget’ link,” she wrote.

Rogers then continued, “Or you can simply add the Google Talk gadget to your iGoogle home page.”  This also makes sense, as product integration seems to be an area in which Google’s trying to get ahead.

While Google’s RE<C announcement was frankly astonishing, sometimes it’s nice not to be surprised; the development related to the Google Talk Gadget, though far from groundbreaking, neatly proves this point.

It is easy to take a series of events as being personal, but sometimes they are just a series of events and no personal damage is meant, and/or the person doing the damage is an anonymous third party. Also, priorities and goals and reasoning inside a large company can seem vastly different than how they appear outside of the same company, especially when the company has 13,000 employees and keeps doubling in size about every other year.

I still believe that many of my Google criticisms and concerns are valid, but there is only so much Matt can do, and he is doing the best he feels he can, and probably far better than I could do if I had his job. The keyboard is mightier than the pen.

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The Club, which had searchers play puzzle games in order to win prizes, originally gave Microsoft a huge boost in search engine market share, a gain which has slowly dissapeared entirely in the last few months. Even worse, though, is the anger the Club’s fans are now turning towards the company.

Commenters have been showing up in increasing numbers at my original six month old Live Search Club post, complaining about cancelled or undelivered prize orders, a dead website, removed prizes and bugs. There’s talk of a class action lawsuit, and you can see some more complaints on the Wikipedia Talk page. Has Microsoft screwed up, or is it fighting back so aggressively against cheaters that it is causing a lot of anger among legitimate players?

Either way, we haven’t heard the last of this story. It looks like, in the end, Microsoft had negligible gains from the promotion, and there are a lot of headaches to come from its management, or mismanagement, of same.

If you’ve had a good or bad experience, feel free to post about it in the comments.

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