Google's April Fool's Day 2008

Google has lived up to the tradition and delivered another entertaining bunch of Hoaxes this April Fool's day of 2008.

• Google's main blog announces Virgle. "Virgin founder Richard Branson and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin will be leading hundreds of users on one of the grandest adventures in human history: Project Virgle, the first permanent human colony on Mars."
  
  And if you think that's funny, checkout...
  
  1. The 100 year plan
     
  2. Got what it takes to join a startup civilization?
     Take the 15-question multiple choice quiz that will help determine your potential suitability as a Virgle Pioneer.
     
  3. Virgle City
     
     and my personal favourite:
     
  4. Open Source Planet
     
  
  

• Google Korea found a new technology for translating dialects that was integrated in Gmail and Google Talk.
  
  
  
• Google Australia announces gDay, a new feature of Google that lets you search today the web pages published tomorrow. "Google spiders crawl publicly available web information and our index of historic, cached web content. Using a mashup of numerous factors such as recurrence plots, fuzzy measure analysis, online betting odds and the weather forecast from the iGoogle weather gadget, we can create a sophisticated model of what the internet will look like 24 hours from now. We can use this technique to predict almost anything on the web – tomorrow's share price movements, sports results or news events. Plus, using language regression analysis, Google can even predict the actual wording of blogs and newspaper columns, 24 hours before they're written!"
  
  
  
• If Google Australia lets you see the future, Gmail gives you the option to change the past with Gmail Custom Time. "Just click Set custom time from the Compose view. Any email you send to the past appears in the proper chronological order in your recipient's inbox."
  
  
  
  
• YouTube tries to rickroll everyone by linking all the featured videos from the homepage to Rick Astley's (in)famous song "Never Gonna Give You Up" (video no longer available on YouTube).
  
  
  
• Google Book Search has a new feature: capturing a book's smell. "I'm pleased to let you know that we've made some headway with one type of volume we've struggled with in the past: books employing scratch-and-sniff technology. Using special equipment and tricky JavaScript, we're now able to capture some of the smells during the scanning process and then embed them in your web browser when you preview these titles in Google Book Search."
  
  

Want more? - Checkout last year's hoaxes