By way of explication, The New Yorker’s Ian Crouch has a little fun with What Would I Say? -- a brand new app that produces phrases by synthesizing old Facebook status updates. Recently concocted by a team of grad students in Princeton’s Quantitative and Computational Biology program, the app is spreading like a virus thanks to mentions by Gawker and other Web sites. Crouch, for one, doubts whether the app has legs, but marvels at the creativity of young developers. 

Most Web watchers may have missed the most interesting feature of Google’s latest Search app update, this week. Not ars technica, though. “The real news is that voice search can now hold a conversation,” it writes. “When [users] don't provide enough information for a command, Google will now verbally ask for clarification.” According to ars technica, there is now little that separates Google's voice interface from Apple’s Siri. 

Hinting at even headier days for tech startups, Snapchat is reportedly rebuffing acquisition offers that only recently would be been considered delusional. Facebook, for one, just offered $3 billion in cash for the messaging service, The Wall Street Journal’s Digits blog reports. “The approaches to Snapchat come amid rising exuberance for social media, and mobile-messaging upstarts in particular.” Whether or not the exuberance turns out to be irrational remains to be seen. 

Yahoo is preparing to host a fire sale on some “premium” domain names, from cyberjokes.com (starting at $1,000) to av.com (starting at $1,000,000). As The Next Web surmises: “The company has simply decided it wants a quick revenue bump as these domains have likely hit their peak in value, and Yahoo has no use for them anyway.”

Creating a unified front, Netflix this week relaunched its user interface for smart TVs and connected devices, including on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4 and Roku 3. To date, Netflix IU experiences have been have ever so different, creating what The Verge called, “interface and feature fragmentation that’s in stark contrast to the ubiquity of the service itself.” 

Shots of Me, the Justin Bieber-backed photo-sharing app made its debut, this week. As TechCrunch reports, the app all about “selfies,” i.e., pictures that users take of themselves. “It’s a social network entirely for selfies,” it writes. “The premise is simple, but it hides the amount of work and detail that went into Shots of Me.” Bieber reportedly led a $1.1 million seed round in the startup, which was developed by the same team behind those popular RockLive-branded social mobile games. 

How big is Google? “It's on course to do $60 billion in revenue this year, almost all of that from advertising,” Business Insider reports, noting that that figure makes the search giant more valuable than either the US newspaper or magazine industries. “In part, this is because the print media has suffered such a precipitous decline,” according to BI. 

Microsoft this week is showing off Bing’s new search section for music videos. “The company says it has been built from the ground up to simplify exploring, discovering, and browsing the best music videos available on the Web,” The Next Web reports. “The service showcases content from leading video sites, including YouTube, Vimeo, MTV, Artist Direct and more. Microsoft also notes it features over 1.7 million songs, 70,000 artists, and a half a million albums.”

Apple is once again delaying a TV launch to focus on its wearable technology efforts, according to analyst Paul Gagnon. “According to sources in the TV supply chain, it appears that Apple’s long-rumored TV plans … have been put on hold again, possibly to be replaced by a rollout of wearable devices,” Gagnon writes on his DisplaySearch blog. Gagnon’s sources are still telling him to expect an actual TV from Apple at some point.

Microsoft’s application marketplace appears to be performing well, TechCrunch reports, citing data that the software giant gives to developers. “The Windows Store marketplace for applications on Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 racked up roughly 1.7 million daily downloads, both free and paid, in October, a 38.56% increase since June.” While direct comparisons are tricky, meanwhile, TechCrunch also says that Microsoft’s app efforts are doing well relative to those of Apple and Google.