Google's April 1, 2008 pranks

For the ninth year running, Google has decided to apply their quirky brand of humor/style to April Fool's Day fun. This year Google really got into the spirit.

First, the announcement that Google has teamed with Virgin, to form Virgle -- an ambitious effort to forge the first permanent human colony on Mars. The Virgle site is pretty complete, with videos asking for interested users to send it their audition tapes (via YouTube, of course), applications (using Google Docs), a 100-year plan and more.

GMail added a "new" feature today as well, Gmail Custom Time, which allows users to send e-mail BACK in time (as far back as April 1, 2004) and still show up chronologically in their recipient's history. Be careful though, you only get 10 (ten) a year!

Google Calendar added an "I'm Feeling Lucky" button which creates an evening date with someone at random. You might get Angelina Jolie, you might get Britney Spears. Google Calendar has also added a new Wake-Up Kit option to make sure you don't miss that date.

But wait, there's more. Try clicking on any featured video on YouTube today, and you'll be Rickrolled. And Google's Blogger Buzz blog (try saying that ten times fast, or even once) has announced an upcoming service called Google Weblogs beta, which will auto-populate your blog with interesting links and media and add your content directly to Google Search results.

[via the Official Google Blog]

Google pranks go International

It's not just the American (or even, English speaking) arm of Google that's in on the fun this year; plenty of International Google sites have concocted their own pranks too.

Google Japan added an option to Universal Search to display Dajare's -- or Japanese puns -- associated with the search terms. Google China revealed plans of creating a social search engine designed to replace Google's algorithm. Our personal favorite is from Google Australia, where they have introduced gDay with MATE that lets you search tomorrow's news today.

[via Google Operating System]

Gmail turns 4 -- AKA, the hoax that wasn't

Of course, not all Google releases on April 1 are jokes -- sometimes they are, in fact, serious. Four years ago today, Gmail was announced to the public. The timing, the amazing amount of storage space (remember, at the time, free e-mail accounts typically offered the customer under 10 MB of storage space (the rare account allowed for up to 25 MB), 1 GB was unheard of and sounded too good to be true) and the unexpected foray into more personal productivity services left many users and analysts skeptical, but Google was for real. Four years later, Gmail is STILL in beta, but anyone is free to sign-up (does anyone else remember when you could sell your Gmail invites on eBay? I was never able to because I got mine FROM someone on the Gmail team, but a few friends made $20 or $30 a pop selling invites to a FREE service) and the service continues to expand and evolve.

It didn't take long for Gmail to completely change the webmail industry. Storage restrictions became almost irrelevant, as the other major players scrambled to catch-up. The clean interface and fast (compared to other services available at the time) loading times became industry standard as well, and despite the hubub over the privacy implications of the AdSense ads, Gmail has become a way of life for lots and lots of people. With Google Apps, you can even have your domain mail server controlled by Google for personal or business usage. What really continues to set Gmail apart is their spam filtering technology. Before Gmail, junk mail was one of the biggest negatives of using a web based mail client. Spam is still a problem, but it is by no means as severe or prevalent. Happy birthday Gmail!

A look back at some of our favorite "April 1 Google hoaxes"

Wikipedia has very thorough list of Google hoaxes from the past, but here are some of our favorites:

• Google Gulp (2005) -- at the height of the vanity energy drink boom, Google created mock-ups for Google Gulp. The drink made users more intelligent, and thus better able to take advantage of Google's search engine for more optimized results.
• Gmail Paper (2007) -- touted as, "the scrapbooker's dream," Google Paper allowed infinite printed copies of messages, snail-mailed to your door, for free. How was this possible? Ads in 32 pt Helvetica (in red) appeared on the back of every message and the paper was a special blend of soybeans and magic that actually IMPROVED the Earth.
• PigeonRank (2002) -- It turns out the secret to PageRank is all in the beak -- the beaks of pigeons! Superior trained pigeon clusters (PCs) could compute the relative value of a page much, much faster human editors or even machine-based algorithms. Pigeons FTW!

And one more thing...

Because we love you (and because YouTube disabled all the embeds on this video), we implore you to watch this clip.

If we're missing any Google hoaxes from today, please let us know in the comments!