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! :)

I came across this when looking for statistics comparing online movie piracy and “legal” downloads from movie stores like iTunes Store and Amazon Unbox, after learning that Apple has introduced iTunes Movie Rentals today.

Can’t find any useful statistics (not trying hard enough?), but according to the exaggerated figures from MPAA’s website, Internet piracy cost the movie industry $7 billion dollars worldwide in 2005.

[YouTube: Anti-Piracy Ad from The IT Crowd]

Googlified reader Morgan commented on the Google’s New Year logo post that there maybe a hidden message in the logo. Upon further examination of the logo, the hidden message slowly reveals itself as “SYN SYN/ACK ACK” - the “three way handshake” that establishes the communication between two computers over a TCP connection. An analogy for this, from the PCCitizen website is, “you picking up your phone, getting a dial tone, dialing the number, hearing ringing, and then the other party saying ‘hello’ or ‘mushi mushi.’”

I was looking for more than that, but well. :)

[thanks Morgan :)]

People can easily find me on Google (and what kind of person I am), but the problem is that a lot of people have difficulty spelling my name (Hoachi is the most common, occasionally Hochi, and all kind of weird combination of letters).

[chart by Jessica Hagy]

Once in a while Google Suggest (comes with Firefox) returns unexpected results, sometimes funny, sometimes frustrating. Let’s see what people say about it.

• Google Suggest is cool and also completely useless - Chris Justus
• Google Suggest is racist - Barry Schwartz
• Google Suggest is awesome!!!!!!!!! - Ragib Hasan
• Google Suggest is perverted - Matthew Bodaly
• Google Suggest is censored - “Cash“
• Google Suggest is ANTI-Internet - “clovercase“

I am going to say that “Google Suggest (for Firefox) is not working for me right now.” Yes, I will restart Firefox later. :)

I was like, “Wow.” Seriously.

On a related note, Google Earth updated their imagery for several countries.

… You can break the Internet. - by The IT Crowd: Smoke & Mirrors.

You have seen those Google 411 ads on big billboards, now they are running around San Francisco on taxi toppers.

[photo by Niall Kennedy, used under a CC-license]

I didn’t expect this coming, but Spooglers is “an informal group of spouses/partners of Zooglers (Zürich Googlers) who organize get-togethers and share information about life in Switzerland and dealing with Zooglers.” They even have a website, Spooglers.org, and a secret society on Google Groups!

Sounds fun. :)

[photo by Thomas Benkö, used under a CC-license]

I think Google can do better than that, “God of Psychic work”?

FYI, data from Google Trends shows that more people use “math” in search queries than “maths” and “mathematics”.

UPDATE: Google updated with a more acceptable definition. They should send me a t-shirt for that.

LastMinute.com held The LastMinute.com Cricket Challenge on August 10th at the Lord’s Cricket Ground (London) on August 10th. Not sure about the result of the games, but it doesn’t really matter: the process is more important than the result. :)

related: Google vs. eBay: Netball Championship and Google Vs. Yahoo: Battle Over The Net

[photo by Danksy, used under a CC-license]

The Official Google Blog is debunking the popular “Black Google Saves Energy” myth that’s running around the WorldWildWeb recently.

[O]ur own analysis as well as that of others shows that making the Google homepage black will not reduce energy consumption. To the contrary, on flat-panel monitors (already estimated to be 75% of the market), displaying black may actually increase energy usage. Detailed results from a new study confirm this.

I suggest Blackle to change their tagline to “Over 100 thousand watts wasted” to avoid misguidance. Sweet, if you need a slogan for you startup, contact me. :)

[Screenshot by Jarques Pretorius]