Skip to main content

April Fool: Gmail Motion and Goggle's Pranks for 2011

APRIL FOOL!!!




Yes that is the spirit of the day. Everybody tries to fool you today (and you try likewise). My day too started with my mother fooling me :(
And then of course I got into action :) After a few pranks I logged onto the net too see what Google had in store for us, like it every year had on April Fool's day. And i was not disappointed.

Gmail had a new revolutionary product for us. Gmail Motion!!

See the video here:



Gmail product manager Paul McDonald, in a deadpan explanatory video, said Gmail Motion uses a "language of movements that replaces type entirely" and ends reliance on "outdated technologies" like the keyboard and mouse.

Of course let me clarify. If you don't already know...YEAH this is the Google way to april fool us. :D
Just the prank I was waiting for. If you still haven't seen it go here

But though this was the hugely popular and shared link of Google's April fool. I googled a bit and found a few more similar pranks by Google itself :P
Looks like even in the April fool arena there is compitition within google and Gmail Motion won the King's Throne to be the April fool prank.
Nevertheless The other pranks are quite as good.

First on the list is

So what is this? With this Google promises to improve our browsing experience by using fingers!!
In their words

Want to increase your hands’ STRENGTH and DEXTERITY while browsing the web FASTER and fitting into sleeker, SEXIER gloves?
Chromercise is the finger fitness program you’ve been drumming the table for. BUILD muscle tone and flexibility! ELIMINATE unsightly
upper-finger flab! Surf the Net like a speed-typing master! Put the world in your hands—GET CHROMERCISED!
See the video here  

Goto The real Link here: Chromercise

Next on the list is from Google Jobs!! :P Want a job in Google? This might just be the job you want :D


So what precisely is it? It's very simple. Remember that Google instant search? Yeah this is a job to be "Autocompleter". Meaning you get to guess what people are gonna search and have to provide that instant search. In their words



Every day people start typing more than a billion searches on Google and expect Google to predict what they are looking for. In order to do this at scale, we need your help.
Google's quality team is looking for talented, motivated, opinionated technologists to help us predict what users are looking for. If you’re eager to improve the search experience for millions of people and have a proven track record of excellence, this is a project for you!
You might want to view the video here :P


Go to the post here: Google Auto-completer

Next comes Google Cow!! from the Google Labs :P

The less I say about this is better. :P
You should all just see this video to understand what it is :P



The original link can be found in: Google Cow


Another new entry. Google translator for Animals :P


This is Google uk production.


I think you can get the basic idea from the image.
Now this one is an Android App!! And it is actually available to download via this barcode (my android friends point your camera this way)
In their words 

We are excited to introduce Translate for Animals, an Android application which we hope will allow us to better understand our animal friends. We've always been a pet-friendly company at Google, and we hope that Translate for Animals encourages greater interaction and understanding between animal and human.
Translate for Animals is an application for Android phones that recognises and transcribes words and phrases that are common to a species, like cats for example. 
View the video here


Now the second-last and the most enchanting one: Google Teleportation :P



Now this one is from Google china and the whole page is in chinese (and yeah the Google instant translator won't work here.)
So what this one is supposed to do?
Well that part is quite astonishing. In google's word:

Through the search is to let Google take you through time and space, most want to reach your arrival time, place, with an immersive way to perceive everything you want to perceive. For example:
  • Would like to know beauty tips to lose weight?
  •  Today, any search engine on the planet can not give you accurate answers. Please use the Google search through! When you personally through the heroes, beauty, sword, horse of the late Spring and Autumn, you have the opportunity to see the beauty of true tolerance, when she ask for thin Cheats!
Now when you search something...anything then you arrive at an ajax enhanced page with many things along with this recommendation :P


Dressed in the crossing before the guarantee clean, glossy hair, and make sure you have that may be encountered on this through all the fantasy or not the result of fantasy are mentally prepared.Now, to start thinking Macross transfer function, Make sure you follow the action under the figure of four beats, earnestly to do gymnastics again through Google:
You can see the original link here : Google Teleport
Now the last one :)
Google is playing with the world's love of Helvetica and hate of Comic Sans fonts. (I'm generalizing and editorializing here.) If you search for "Helvetica" in Google, the results show up in Comic Sans. OK, maybe not everyone will find that as hilarious as those of us who've worked in typography will, but maybe it'll at least make your eyeballs smile this morning.

Google is renowned for its April Fool's jokes, which over the years have included job applications for positions on the Moon and the revelation that its Internet search rankings are compiled by pigeons.

And these things certainly made my day (partially).

These are all I could find today. if any of you encountered any more pranks by google made for 2011 April Fool, don't forget to leave a comment here :)

Edit: Just included a new prank i just found out.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

FirefoxOS, A keyboard and prediction: Story of my first contribution

Returning to my cubical holding a hot cup of coffee and with a head loaded with frustration and panic over a system codebase that I managed to break with no sufficient time to fix it before the next morning.  This was at IBM, New York where I was interning and working on the TJ Watson project. I returned back to my desk, turned on my dual monitors, started reading some blogs and engaging on Mozilla IRC (a new found and pretty short lived hobby). Just a few days before that, FirefoxOS was launched in India in the form of an Intex phone with a $35 price tag. It was making waves all around, because of its hefty price and poor performance . The OS struggle was showing up in the super low cost hardware. I was personally furious about some of the shortcomings, primarily the keyboard which at that time didn’t support prediction in any language other than English and also did not learn new words. Coincidentally, I came upon Dietrich Ayala in the FirefoxOS IRC channel, who at

April Fool and Google Part 2: A Round Up of ALL of Google’s April Fools Jokes

Ok....this post I think will contain all of the pranks I could find  for today. After my last post here http://rkrants.blogspot.com/2012/04/april-fool-and-google-my-favorite.html Last Time I reported Only a handful of the pranks.. Understandable, as it was only the morning. After that I stumbled upon more of them Which I am gonna round up here. Now staring with the list. The very first one is obviously our favourite Google Maps Quest The above is their official video. In a post in Google Plus they say about it as follows  Today  + Google Maps  announced Google Maps 8-bit for NES. With #8bitmaps , you can do everything you'd normally do in Maps—search for famous landmarks and sites around the world, get directions and even use Street View. Just in time for April Fool's Day, Google has introduced Google Maps Quest, a retro 8-bit version of its mapping tool that is... totally awesome. In a characteristically whimsical video, available above, Google emplo

Curious case of Cisco AnyConnect and WSL2

One thing Covid has taught me is the importance of VPN. Also one other thing COVID has taught me while I work from home  is that your Windows Machine can be brilliant  as long as you have WSL2 configured in it. So imagine my dismay when I realized I cannot access my University resources while being inside the University provided VPN client. Both of the institutions I have affiliation with, requires me to use VPN software which messes up WSL2 configuration (which of course I realized at 1:30 AM). Don't get me wrong, I have faced this multiple times last two years (when I was stuck in India), and mostly I have been lazy and bypassed the actual problem by side-stepping with my not-so-noble  alternatives, which mostly include one of the following: Connect to a physical machine exposed to the internet and do an ssh tunnel from there (not so reliable since this is my actual box sitting at lab desk, also not secure enough) Create a poor man's socks proxy in that same box to have my ow