Thursday, April 1, 2010

The Worst April Fool's Joke Ever - Courtesy of Google


The Worst April Fool's Joke Ever
Courtesy of Google
By: BlueRose

I doubt all of you even noticed, but today Google pulled its notorious April Fool's Day prank.

The Prank, however, lacked a certain "Je ne sais quoi" that Google is usually great at displaying.

Google, for their prank, decided to change the Header on their page to "Topeka" instead of "Google" for the day.



The title at the top left of the page still said Google, the URL still said Google, and given Google's aversion to constantly changing their header, I didn't even give it a second thought when they made the change today.

One of the reasons I personally am a huge fan of Google is because of their creativity. They literally find ways to incorporate anything you ever thought possible into Internet search engines/web hosting.

I am amazed every week as I find new tools to help me here on the blog. For instance, I have access to any number of Traffic reports. From what my views were on any given day, to detailed reports of what percentage of my users are clicking ads, Google has incorporated so many tools into its product that I still haven't figured them all out yet.

Even if you branch out of the technical world, Google's programs have a fun, friendly interface that is quite refreshing (in my opinion). Through Blogger (the Google run program that this website was created through) we were allowed to set-up our own administrative email accounts hosted on Google's servers.*

This has been a constant source of entertainment to me because of the fun dialogue the interface provides. I signed on the other day, and to help me cope with the frustration of having no new mail, Google had a comical little text box saying "No new Messages, our servers are feeling lonely :(" instead of the usual "Inbox: 0".

It's this user friendliness, and technical applicability, that Google amazes me with on an every day basis.

....and this is why I am confused as to why Google would take an opportunity for so much exposure**, and throw up such a lob like this.

Google clearly posses the creative minds to come up with a much better prank than this, but instead of a story that sets the Internet abuzz with discussion, they manage to pull off a prank that almost no one notices.

- Blue Rose

P.S. That's 16 uses of the word "Google" in this article. The word really starts to lose meaning after about 10

* bluerose@s-words.org if you're interested

**Especially with sites like Bing nipping at their heels

2 comments:

  1. Why not use synonyms in replacement like "the company said". Also, the article fails to mention the reason WHY google changed their name to Topeka, more information was also given if one hovered the mouse over the icon. The reason why it was "Topeka" is because Kansas changed it's city's name from "Topeka" to "Google" in an effort to gain notoriety in the google gigabit per second internet service.

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  2. I know, but since this article is in the current events section i really just wanted it to be about the current event going on.

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