Matt's Blog

Matt Cutts just posted that he will not be doing an April Fools joke this year. I wonder if this is just to throw people off…

Apparently this year Google Australia has it’s own April Fools joke. They’ve introduced “gDay with MATE”, a new search feature that allows you “to search content on the internet before it is created”. gDay is powered by “Machine Automated Temporal Extrapolation” (MATE). Here’s some more details:

Using MATE’s™ machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques developed in Google’s Sydney offices, we can construct elements of the future.

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!

To rank these future pages in order of relevance, gDay™ uses a statistical extrapolation of a page’s future PageRank, called SageRank.

Pretty good, but hopefully Google.com will have something better.

Same as last year, PHP.net has some (only seen one so far) different logos.

Boring. Anything original PHP?

Update: Just say the dog one from last year too.

John Chow has posted that he’s entered an agreement with Coca-Cola to produce “John Chow Cola”, a drink that supossedly uses “Liquid Neuro Enhancers” to make post ideas “pop” into the head of the drinker. He posted more details:

John Chow Cola is the first drink in the world to use Liquid Neuro Enhancers (LNE). A technology that took The Coca-Cola Company over ten years to develop. Unlike a sport drinks that only enhance physical performance, the LNE used in John Chow Cola enhances the brain’s ability to come up with new blog post ideas. One drink is all it takes to get a sugar rush of ideas pouring in.

He’s also giving away 10000 six packs of the dream drink, and 1000 trips to the launch party:

Want to be among the first to try John Chow Cola? Simply reply to this post and John Chow dot Com and The Coca-Cola Company will send you a free six pack! You better get your comment in quick however. We’re only giving away 10,000 cases.

In addition to the free six pack, 1,000 winners will be selected at random to fly all expenses paid to New York city for the John Chow Cola World Wide Launch Party on April 15. This is going to be the biggest party New York has ever seen! Reply now to get in on it!

Not a particularly good April Fools joke. However, if Coca-Cola had “announced” something like this (called someone else than John Chow Cola), it’d be better.

TechCrunch is apparently suing Facebook for $25 million in statutory damages. TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington alleges that Facebook has allowed advertisements that use his picture and name as an endorse without his permission. Here’s the details about the “lawsuit”:

In truth, there hasn’t been much in way of actual damages to back up the lawsuit. But where we’ll really be able to stick it to Facebook is the $750 per incident statutory damages. It’s a stretch, but we’re going to argue that every impression of an ad that includes my name or likeness is an “incident.” Based on our calculations and recent comscore data, we estimate the number of impressions to be in the hundreds of thousands at the very least. Multiplying that number by $750 gets us to damages of at least $150 million.

At this point we’re prepared to settle the case for $25 million in Facebook stock (priced at the employee option price, not that ridiculous $15 billion Microsoft valuation), a small fraction of the amount we’ll almost certainly receive if this case goes to trial, plus guaranteed exclusives on all new Facebook product releases. A recent case involving Taster’s Choice, for example, had an award of $15.6 million in damages.

This is actually a pretty good April Fools joke, much better than last year’s (which was also pretty good).