Realty World Northern California & Nevada

Apple released Siri, a voice activated personal assistant, exclusively on the iPhone 4s. Siri allows you to use your voice to send messages, schedule meetings, place phone calls, and more. Sounds too good to be true? That’s what I thought. But it really works well… and she has a sense of humor!

Here are some items that I find most useful to use:

• Send text messages
• Send emails
• Check calendar schedule
• Add calendar appointments
• Move existing appointments
• Set reminders
• Set alarms and timers
• Calling contacts
• Directions to locations
• Finding the nearest Starbucks
• Play songs or playlists
• Checking stock markets
• Finding out about the weather

Facebook is about ready to launch a replacement to your “profile” with “Timeline”. Timeline is a radical new look to your profile. A large photo is featured at the top, known as a “Cover” to your Timeline. Your profile picture is smaller and displayed on the bottom left of your Cover. Your Friends, Photos, Map (check-ins), and Likes are displayed below your Cover.

Timeline essentially a scrapbook of your life containing photos you’ve posted, status updates, places you’ve checked in, when you joined Facebook, all of the way back to your birth. The items displayed in this scrapbook-like style are your “Stories” and can be starred, or featured, on your Timeline and will be expanded to a widescreen view.

All of your Stories displayed on your Timeline can be controlled for privacy concerns. Editing the information displayed is done through a new style interface, which I found to be surprisingly easy to manage.

Facebook will be officially launching Timeline on September 29, 2011.

For a closer look at Facebook’s Timeline click on the image below. I’ve blurred out my friends’ Stories (just to be safe).

Finally, Facebook has granted me access to Lists!

A much needed feature (mimicking Google+ Circles) allow you to organize your friends and control what you see in your News Feed and allows you to post updates to specific people.

In addition to Lists, Facebook provides “Smart Lists” which creates lists for you based on your friends’ profiles to help save time. I noticed it didn’t really find everyone that should be in the Lists but it did assist in providing suggested Lists for me to create.