April 1st, 2008
Oh Noes, April Fools has lost it’s mojo
I remember when April Fools rolled around, things remained in a state of normalcy, with the odd joke you really couldn’t tell if it was real or not. Today, April Fools has taken a turn for the worse. Everybody and their dog at Google has spent the last month preparing jokes instead of working, and that doesn’t even include all the other Google-related pranks being pulled across the web too.
Philipp Lenssen has a massive list of Google-related jokes this year — it’s sad, but it took me about five minutes to read his point form article from top to bottom. Here are a few of the points from Philipp’s post:
- The Google Talk blog reports wants to help lower CO2 emissions and starts reducing the characters you send… by converting them to instant-messenger-speak. For instance, the sentence “As far as I’m concerned, you can give me the twenty dollars you owe me when I see you later.” will be automatically translated to “AFAIC, U can gve me the 20 $$ YOM whn I CUL8R.” before it reaches the other person. You can already see how your texts will translate thanks to the
- YouTube is rickrolling its users big-scale. All the featured videos on the YouTube.com frontpage are currently linking to Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up. Or, as a commenter at YouTube puts it in the comments to the video, “HAHAHAHHHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHA lol nice youtube”.
- Google Australia delivers gDay with MATE technology to “search content on the internet before it’s created,” i.e., from the future. From the page: “Google spiders crawl publicly available web information and our index of historic, cached web content. Using a mashup of numerous factors such as recurrence plots, fuzzy measure analysis, online betting odds and the weather forecast from the iGoogle weather gadget, we can create a sophisticated model of what the internet will look like 24 hours from now.” I saw this yesterday already and tried to search for “Google Blogoscoped” and indeed, found this post and opened its Google Cache version – I was then able to copy the full text of the post, which saved me a lot of writing today.
- Google’s social network site Orkut turned into Yogurt today, according to their logo.
It’s not just me though, Matt Cutts is also taking a break from April Fools this year. Hopefully, even though I highly doubt it, next year there will be more real news, and a lot less trickery.
Garett Rogers is employed as a programmer for iQmetrix, which specializes in retail management software for the wireless industry. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
