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! :)

Mihai Parparita, a developer at Google (mostly on Google Reader) and author of many cool things that you have heard of or used, released a Python program today called Mail Trends that “let’s you analyze and visualize your email.” The program will generate a page like the Trends page in Google Reader or that in Search History, with information such as the trend of the email’s incoming/outgoing traffics and “Top people that I send mail to”.

The program is currently for Gmail only, but it has plans to offer support for other email services (with IMAP). It should take only a few minutes to generate the Mail Trends page, but that really depends on how many emails you have (as well as your computer).

On a related note, Web History Trends haven’t been updated for almost 3 weeks.

A few days ago Philipp posted about the Gmail Art Ad video on Google Blogoscoped, and the Official Gmail Blog today shared more behind-the-scene information about the video.

162 meters of gray tape, 45 lego pieces, 32 sticks of plasticine, 18 brushes, 18 square meters of batten, 12 cans of spray paint, 10 liters of white paint, 4 reams of paper, 2 kilograms of millet porridge, 1 printer, 1 hair dryer, 1 mop, and 1 saw.

And that the M at the end of the video was created using “3 sweaters, 3 balls, 3 pillows, 2 dumbbells, 2 pair of gloves, a set of child’s plates, a hockey stick, a scarf, a paper folder, hats and slippers.”

The video’s YouTube page explained that this video was “produced [by Saatchi Moscow] for Google to attract more Russian people on GMail.”

Google added a new feature to Gmail Chats recently that allows users to change their presence status to “invisible”. When you set your presence status to Invisible, you will be appear as Offline to your contacts but you will still be able to chat with the people you want to chat with.

(At least that’s how it should work, although it never seem to work for me. Whenever I set my status to Invisible, my contacts will still be able to see me and be like, “No, you are ONLINE!”)

If you are using Gmail Chat and a desktop IM client at the same time, you will probably see a warning message when switching to Invisible: “Oops! You are not invisible because you’re also using desktop software that doesn’t support invisibility, such as Google Talk.”

I remember I poked fun at Harry Potter’s invisible cloak last week, can’t remember what it was though. Lulz.

[photo by Phoebe Epstein, used under a CC-license; via Google Blogoscoped forum]

The newly founded Email Standards Project recently a project called “Project Gmail Grimace“, asking people (main audience: web designers) to take a picture of “the face they make when trying to get their emails to render properly in Gmail.”

(Gmail has “a few issues” rendering emails, based on the Email Standards Project’s standard. On the other hand, AOL Webmail, Windows Live Mail, and Yahoo! Mail provides solid supports.)

To be part of the movement, take a photo of your face (or somebody else’s), join Project Gmail Grimace’s Flickr group, and post your photo. If you don’t have a Flickr account and doesn’t want to register one, you can email your photo directly to them. You can find out more about this on their blog.

(I don’t really want fancy emails, but) Spread the word.

[photo by Rowen Atkinson, used under a CC-license]

A while ago the Gmail team asked you to tell your story of Gmail in the form of video, and 80 video responses later, the Gmail team made a compilation of those videos from users glorifying Gmail (only with videos telling what the Google people want to hear, and what they want you to hear).

Now we just need the another side of the story, the “Gmail sucks!” ones. (And then someone will be like, “Leave Gmail Alone!“)

A reader of this blog sent in an email informing me that he’s seeing new version of Gmail in his Google Apps account.

I’m using Google Apps and this afternoon noticed that Gmail 2.0 has arrived. Fast indexing of emails, new contacts and labels. Working like a charm!

Just checked my Google Apps account for this domain and it’s still using the older version of Gmail. I guess Google is slowly rolling out this to Google Apps users. Make sure to check the “Next generation” option in Domain settings (in the domain’s control panel) if you want these new features earlier.

[thanks Alex.]

Gmail updated its homepage today with a heartwarming photo by Susanne Jespersen to wish “Happy holidays” to everyone (well, the page is shown to U.S. users only), along with a cryptic message (IMO):

There may be snow outside, but hopefully there snow spam in your inbox. May your inbox be filled with joy this holiday season and beyond.

“[S]now spam in your inbox.” What’s that mean? I don’t get it (unless Gmail really means to “snow spam” in my inbox).

UPDATE: LOL, I am so in the vacation mood. I should have read that aloud. Thanks to everyone in the comment for pointing it out! :)

The Gmail team wants to hear your story of using Gmail (good or bad, but I think they would prefer the former) in the form of video. To tell your story, just record a 30-second (or less) video and post it as a response to Gmail’s video on YouTube before December 31st.

I uploaded mine, but the audio didn’t come out right. I will try again some other time. :D

UPDATE: Here’s the video. :)

It’s for real this time, you can now chat with your buddies on AIM in Gmail Chat, as spotted by a reader of Google Operating System last month. Google is currently slowly rolling out this new feature to IE7 and Firefox 2 users with English as their language in Gmail.

You should be seeing an option in the Settings page under the Chat tab where you can sign into AIM if Gmail already had this feature enabled for you. If not, you can just sit back and wait for a few days, or give it a shot to see if changing your language setting in Gmail and the browser will work - as you are so eager to see it. :)

Your contacts from AIM will have the little icon next to the name when the person is online.

I think that Google Talk (desktop and the flash version) will also include this feature on their next release. Believe or not, Austin is the only person I have on AIM. :)

Several Gmail users reported on the Google Blogoscoped forum that they have spotted a new feature that allows users to pick colors for their labels, like what Google Calendar has for highlighting events.

And you can remove labels from an email that you are viewing.

Google is probably experimenting with this feature because I don’t have it in my account yet. Or perhaps, they are rolling it out to small group of users one at a time, like Philipp said.

They also said that Gmail got faster. O RLY? :)

UPDATE: Okay, it’s now official, and everyone should have it now. Have some labeling fun. :)

[screenshots by Bas Quentin, from Google Blogoscoped]

Gmail changes the title of its home page for the first time since its launch in April 2004. The title of the page, which has always been “Welcome to Gmail” for the last three and a half years, now reads “Gmail: Email from Google“.

It was just last week that my friend said something like, “I didn’t know Gmail’s from Google” when I was logging into my Gmail to show him the photos I took while at Wisconsin. I mean, a lot of people don’t know that Gmail’s from Google.

In other news, Gmail just passed the 5 GB mark, according to the little counter they have on the home page.