View From the Phlipside Radio - Silly Siri

My name is Jay Phillippi and I've spent my life in and around the media.  TV, radio, the movies and more.  I love them, and I hate them and I always have an opinion.  Call this the View from the Phlipside.

There are days when I am just astounded by some of the things I read.  Apple debuted the iPhone 4s just over a month ago.  One of the hot new apps for the fifth generation smart phone was a little something called Siri.  Now Siri is interesting from a variety of points of view.  Siri is a personal assistant app that allows you to talk with the phone and have her (the app has a female voice so it’s inevitable that it will be referred to as she) answer you.  This voice activated control system is interesting in that it grew from work done by DARPA ( Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the folks who brought us the Internet among many other things) as part of the ongoing research into what is called Artificial Intelligence.  The idea is that you can put your phone to work without having to invest your total attention to it.  I guess that’s a good idea.

But here’s the part that just astounds me.  Last week the Siri service stopped working.  For about 5 hours.  Seems that it was so popular right off the bat that the Apple servers that are the backbone for this application just couldn’t handle the traffic and crashed.  OK, I mean Apple lists Siri as a beta project which means they are still working on it and that it’s not in its final form.  There hasn’t really been an application like this before and it’s brand new.  What amazes me isn’t that the service crashed.  That’s not surprising.  No what’s amazing is how hysterical some users became over the service drop.  People were quoted talking about how they couldn’t live without Siri.  And were just cringing at the thought they might actually have to use their Google app again.  This is for a service that max they’ve had use of for a month.  And it’s not like the multi day service drop that folks with Blackberries recently endured.  I’m hoping this is just carefully selected fanboy and fangirl reactions in order to fluff up an otherwise lackluster story.  Because the alternative is just too appalling to consider.

Siri might just be the opening shot of the silliest of silly seasons.

Call that the View From the Phlipside