Mark Zuckerberg unveiled Graph Search to the world this morning at Facebook’s HQ.

Amidst rumors of a mysterious smartphone and new iPad apps, Facebook held a big press event today at its headquarters in Menlo Park, California. The topic was search, or more specifically, social search. It’s a new feature Facebook is calling “Graph Search,” and the beta has started rolling out already. It will be available for all of Facebook’s one billion users soon.

Think of Graph Search as Google with a more personal touch. Facebook is leveraging everything it knows about you to help you connect with people who like what you like. Instead of leaving Facebook.com to get your results, all of your social data and timeline history is mined and collated inside Facebook’s walls. That’s good news for Facebook, and bad news for Google.

During the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week, ZTE announced a brand new partnership with Nuance that will bring the company’s famous voice recognition software to ZTE’s upcoming smartphone family. The first devices to offer voice interaction will be launching this year, with support for more than 25 different languages and a new “Car Mode” app designed for use behind the wheel.

In case you hadn’t already heard, Google finally released an official Google Maps app for iPhone on Wednesday night, and I must say, I think it’s terrific. It’s super quick, it looks fantastic, and it brings back all the mapping features you had on your iPhone before Apple gave Google Maps the boot — including Street View and transit directions. Google has also thrown its own turn-by-turn navigation into the mix for good measure.

In fact, the new Google Maps app for iPhone is so good that Google admits it’s better than the Android version. It also promises an iPad version is coming soon.

When Google announced Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean), they showed off the new voice actions as well as search cards. Naturally, everyone soon became curious about how the new voice actions compared to its Apple competitor and voice assistant Siri. While most Androidians didn’t have a spare iPhone 4S on hand, one blogger for TechnoBuffalo did, and was kind enough to put them to the test.

BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2012 — In Russia, if you want to come up with a mascot for your company or a character for your app, there’s no focus groups or testing: it all comes from the top down.

That’s why when Russian app development and publishing company iFree wanted to release a new virtual assistant for Android and iOS to take on Siri, i-Free’s Kirill Petrov dictated the design of i-Free’s latest character. He would be an all white, gremlin-like humanoid with huge flashing teeth and glowing yellow eyes. He would hail from the planet Edelweiss (named after a beer), and he would come to Earth in the time-honored tradition of many alien invaders before him: namely to kidnap our women for his own lascivious pleasure.

Meet Spoony. He’s terrifying. He uses much of the same core technology as Siri, the distant relation he’d eventually like to kill, or at least surplant. Presumably after making out with her first.