Googlified

Google has tons of pranks for this year’s April Fool’s Day, including Gmail Custom Time, Virgle: The Adventure of Many Lifetimes, Google Wake Up Kit, and more!

• Gmail Custom Time: It enables you to send email back until April 1, 2004.
• Google Human Search (Chinese): searches 250 million volunteers by their personal characteristics.
• Virgle: Virgin and Google team up together to create Project Virgle to build a second Earth on Mars - just in case Earth gives up on us - in the next 100 years.
• Google Wake Up Kit - The kit from Google Calendar is designed to wake you up by whatever means possible - including “a bed-flipping device … for forceful removal from your sleeping quarters.” Google Calendar also added a “I’m Feeling Lucky” button that sets you up for dates with celebrities.
• gDay - Brought to you by the Google Australia team, it let’s you to search contents on the Internet even before it’s created! - “Hi guys, I am from the future.”
• Scratch-and-sniff books - Google Books is “now able to capture some of the smells during the scanning process” and you can smell them in the preview pages!
• Greener Google Talk: To reduce the amount carbon dioxide produced by instant messaging, Google Talk will now shorten the number of characters used in a IM message by “abbreviating words and dropping vowels” - the so-called IM-speak.
• Google Dajare (Japanese): The mission of this project is “to organize the world’s laughter, (allow) people around the world (to) have access to what(ever) they want.”
• YTRickRollsYou - “We’re no strangers to love, You know the rules and so do I … Never gonna give you up, Never gonna let you down … We’ve know each other for so long” - click on any feature videos on YouTube (no, this is not rickroll).
• Google Cash (Russian) - Now you can install the Google Cash portable right from your office or home and make payments for advertising cash roubles - designed exclusively for Russian AdWords users. (I thought the machine is designed to print money to pay for the users’ online advertising campaigns…)
• Yogurt: the new Orkut!
• Google Docs Airplane: Stop typing the boring documents, fold an airplane instead! Go to Google Docs and create a “New airlane!“
• Google Weblogs - New service from Blogger that “Publish text to the web in reverse chronological order.” OMG, this is going to be SO COOL!
• AdSense for Conversation: AdSense will display ads that are relevant to the conversations that you engage in on a headgear that Google provides for you to wear. Also AdSense for Phone Calls (Portuguese).
• FrankRank: a new AdWords ranking algorithm inspired by Frank the hand turkey.

Happy April Fool’s Day everyone! :)

The Settings page in Google Calendar now has a new tab with the name “Offline”. Although I have Google Gears installed, but it doesn’t seem to be working at this moment. I asked Pascal of GoogleWatchBlog and he said that it’s working on his computer either.

Well, at least it made to the Settings page so there must be some exciting (not really) coming soon!

Google yesterday released Google Calendar Sync, a small Windows program that allows users to “Sync Google Calendar with Microsoft Outlook calendar.” You can choose how to sync your calendars with the program, whether 2-way syncing, which will sync both Google Calendar and the Outlook calendar with each other, or 1-way syncing in which you can choose to sync from Google Calendar to Outlook calendar, and vice versa.

There’s an option that you can enter you preferred time interval between each syncing (with the minimum of 10 mins.), and the default is set to 120 minutes (2 hours).

Once you finished the initial setup process, the program will minimize to the system tray and display itself with the Google Calendar icon ().

[via Googling Google]

Didn’t you get the memo? Email spam is out, and the latest trend (for spammers) is to spam/scam people through Google Calender.

[photo by Andrew Huff, used under a CC-license]

Digital Inspiration published a tip of using Google Calendar to send email (and SMS) to your future self. You are probably doing something like this already if you use Google Calendar, like reminding yourself to attend a party on Saturday. However, in this context “future” means months, years, or even decades ahead of now.

Just add a new event like you would normally do, just set the date to be some time in the future, and in the Description box write whatever you want to say to your future self. :)

(Yes, I saved that event in my calendar, and no, I don’t have a job - not now at least, but if you would like to offer me one, that would be awesome.)

Google clearly has plan to bring Google Calendar offline using Google Gears. Many people who have Google Gears installed noticed today that when they go to Google Calendar they are asked to enable Gears for that site.

Tony Ruscoe, who took the time to “decipher” Google Calendar’s script (where you can find a lot of “gears”), found that if you enter javascript:_olp_showPromo(); into your browser when Google Calendar is loaded, you will get a dialog box (picture above) that asks you would you like to “view and edit the next 3 months of your Google Calendar when you’re not connected to the Internet.”

I don’t use Google Calendar anymore because it doesn’t have the features that I need, like to-do list, which, umm, Google promised to launch soon.

[via Google Blogoscoped forum]

Google is now supporting gadgets in Google Calendar (I think they have been doing this for a while). These gadgets  “are special events that appear as icons above a day’s events.” When the user click on the icon, Google Calendar will include the content that the developer of the gadget specified in a small window.

There are two formats that Google supports: the iCalendar Format and the Google Calendar data API. I personally prefer the iCal format because it’s more human-readable.

If you are in the mood of creating some Google Calendar Gadgets, check out the documentation on Google Code. :)

Google today launched Google Calendar Gallery, a place where users can find popular and useful calendar feeds ranging from TV shows listing to Sports to Entertainments.

Here are some highlights of the Calendar Gallery from the Google Press:

• TV listings for your zip code, with extra details on TLC shows
• Presidential candidates’ 2008 schedules from The New York Times
• Sports schedules provided by Eventful and the NBA
• Theme park events and schedules from Disney
• Concert dates from Atlantic Records, Cordless Recordings, Eventful and JamBase
• Movie and DVD release dates from Netflix

Still can’t convince me to use Google Calendar. Or mybe I should try to be more a organized person, time-management wise.

Google Calendar now allows users to create multiple reminders for all of your events to be notified via email, SMS, and pop-up. Huh, pop up? (I am not a Google Calendar user) There are also a few minor updates, as announced in the Google Calendar Support Group.

Dextroz, as a (pissed off) ex-Google Calendar user, speaks out his frustration,

Unfortunately, it was a poor attempt. And even worse was Chris (GCal rep in groups) response. Below is my response to him in groups.

Secondary calendar reminders and other brand new features!

Looks they just managed to pull off another half-assed update and stuck it right there in the middle once more for their users.

Reading Chris’s new update post, who the f*** put a higher priority on “Expanded printing options” and “Send to friend feature” over SYNC and To-Do List?!!

Any moron reading the google posts here would have realized that Sync, Multiple calendar reminders and To do lists are the top 1,2,3 requests. What the hell are you smoking now to come up with baloney like that Chris? Are you spending too much time with the GCal coders?

This reminds me an episode of Diggnation when Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht makes fun of Google Calendar’s feature that shows full moon and half moon. Can’t remember the exact words, but it is something like, “Who sits in front a computer and wants to know when the moon is going to be full?”

Hilarious. ROFLMAO.