Skip to main content

April Fool and Google : My favorite Pranks

Google has done it yet again.

Today is April 1st, the day where you fol everyone. And also the day everyone pulls their pranks on you.
And among that everyone in your virtual life one of my most favourite parnks puller is Google.

And just as I fired up my Lappy today i couldn't help but noticing their hilarious but ingenious pranks.
Now the very First one is 8bit Google Maps, also being told as

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 employees introduce the new version for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), replete with finicky cartridge and 8-bit music.
"With Google Maps 8-bit, you can do all the things you already do on regular Google Maps," writes Tatsuo Nomura, a Google software engineer, in a post on Google's official Maps blog. "Search for famous landmarks and sites around the world. Take an epic journey with 8-bit Street View. Get detailed directions to avoid dangerous paths, and battle your way through a world of powerful monsters and mystic treasures."
To use Quest (from your computer, of course), head over to Google Maps and simply click the "Quest" box in the top right corner. Then, you're whisked away to 8-bit land of maps. Be sure to try Street View in Quest mode.
Apart from this the another one I noticed is


Chrome Multitask mode


This is another masterpiece from Google.
According to their official blog which you can read here

Multitask Mode lets you have access to multiple mice at the same time, so you can make a chess move while you watch a dance move, or draw a horse while you draw on a friend for relationship advice.
Chrome can handle as many mice, touchpads, styli, joysticks, trackballs, and other pointing devices as you can plug into your computer, so you and your friends can browse dozens of sites at the same time.

And whats more amazing is that they also have the toy so that you can play with it :P

Just head over to http://google.com/chrome/multitask and play with it :)

Then comes the fabled


Google Racing


In their own words

We spend a lot of time at Google trying to answer "What ifs?" What if you could find any info you need, the instant you need it? Google Search. What if you could view some of the world’s most renowned art online? The Art Project. And what if you built a self-driving car capable of navigating a track at speeds upwards of 200mph while surrounded by other cars? Our answer to that last one is Google Racing, a partnership with NASCAR to design and build autonomous stock cars. Find out more at google.com/racing.

They really outdid on this one. Head over to the website to gain more insight.

And the last one I almost missed


The Youtube Collection


The title explains it all. I don't need to re-iterate it. Just head over to the video uploaded to the Official Youtube channel.




Now this is just the beginning of the day. I am quite sure they have more such pranks up their sleeves.
I'll cover them all once I start discovering them.

Edit: An updated version of this post is available here

Comments

Post a Comment

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...
Read more

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, availabl...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more