Whether you love the rush of watching one’s mouth fall agape after pinning them with a great prank or hate the one day of the year where nothing is safe, April Fools Day is indeed among us. For those who will be spending their days trying to sift through the endless feed of harmless news that could possibly get them good, here’s a list of some of the biggest buffoonery on the Web to watch out for this year:
SURPRISE! YouTube (News - Alert) was just one big contest…and it’s shutting down tonight.
Apparently, YouTube is finally coming clean on its secret façade – a website hosting a huge video contest that spanned years to declare the winner – and the company decided to reveal this news on the most serious day of the year.
“We started YouTube in 2005 as a contest with the simple goal to find the best video in the world,” explains CEO Salar Kamangar. Crowning its champion today, that means, of course, that tonight at midnight, YouTube will no longer exist.
“After eight amazing years, it is finally time to review everything that has been uploaded to our site and begin the process of selecting a winner,” divulges Tim Liston, competition director at YouTube.
Check out this earth-shattering announcement in the video below. Published just last night, it has already accumulated over 1,600,000 views.
OH BOY! Google (News - Alert) is finally admitting that pirates exist…sort of.
We have all fallen prey to the wondrous invention that is Google Maps. It lets us stalk peoples’ homes (I mean, look up that awesome restaurant you heard about the other day), and essentially serves as a source of monumental distraction. But what about One-Eyed Willy and Co.?
Alas, Google decided to reveal to us today that its Google Maps now includes a treasure map feature for the tech-savvy bootleggers and swashbucklers among us.
The video below reveals a Google Maps Street View Team finding some hidden treasure, but apparently, the maps that belonged to an infamous pirate are undecipherable. Therefore, Google has invited everybody to hop on board to solve the clues to this mystery to find this long lost treasure through its Google Treasure Maps feature.
Google gets bonus points for getting a Doctorate Professor of Marine Archeology to make a cameo in the video, too. Check it out below:
GASP! Google is now letting you sniff it
If you log onto Google today, lined up with “News,” “Images,” “Videos,” and “Web” will be “Nose.” Google Nose is self-described as “the new scentsation in search,” allowing users to “smell and believe,” “come to their senses” and “take a whiff” of their Web queries and searches.
Some smells so far from the company include “unattended litter box” and “wet dog.”
“Google search is incredibly powerful…but we realized there’s an important part of the search experience that we’d overlooked,” explained Google Product Manager Jon Wooly in the video below.
“Our task as designers is to give our users the information they’re looking for as quickly and beautifully as possible. But until now, we couldn’t always give users what they’re looking for, because sometimes, they’re not looking at all,” explains Lena Carddeal, user experience designer at Google.
Check it out below and beware of the rumors! But who knows, maybe one day, this could be a reality.
GET READY! Gmail apparently took six years to develop its ground-breaking “Blue” feature
Gmail Blue was just released today! It’s described as “trying to bring e-mail into the 21rst century,” and is promised to look and feel more “organic” and “natural.”
“Gmail blue was part of the initial conception of Gmail when it launched. At the time, the technology was simply not there,” explained Project Manager Richard Pargo. “How do we completely redesign and recreate something while keeping it exactly the same?”
Wow, this seems impressive! So what exactly is Gmail Blue?
Well…everything is blue. Check out this revolutionary reveal in the video below.