Matt's Blog

April Fools: Gmail Custom Time

April 1st, 2008 at 12:32 AM by Matt Freedman

Google has now announced a new feature for Gmail called Custom Time, which allows you to change the received time for the recipient of your email. You can even choose if it’s read or unread.

How do I use it?
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. You can opt for it to show up read or unread by selecting the appropriate option.

Unfortunately, it comes with some restrictions:

Is there a limit to how far back I can send email?
Yes. You’ll only be able to send email back until April 1, 2004, the day we launched Gmail. If we were to let you send an email from Gmail before Gmail existed, well, that would be like hanging out with your parents before you were born — crazy talk.

How come I only get ten?
Our researchers have concluded that allowing each person more than ten pre-dated emails per year would cause people to lose faith in the accuracy of time, thus rendering the feature useless.

I think Gmail’s April Fools joke last year was better…

April Fools: Project Virgle

April 1st, 2008 at 12:08 AM by Matt Freedman

VirgleGoogle has just announced that they have partnered with the Virgin Group to create Project Virgle, an attempt to create “the first permanent human colony on Mars”.

For thousands of years, the human race has spread out across the Earth, scaling mountains and plying the oceans, planting crops and building highways, raising skyscrapers and atmospheric CO2 levels, and observing, with tremendous and unflagging enthusiasm, the Biblical injunction to be fruitful and multiply across our world’s every last nook, cranny and subdivision.

An invitation. Earth has issues, and it’s time humanity got started on a Plan B. So, starting in 2014, 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.

Actually, this is pretty funny. Especially the Application to Join Project Virgle and the error page. It’s a little too similar to a previous April Fools done by Google awhile ago, which was to put a Google headquarters on the Moon.

ShoeMoney’s April Fools Joke is a Static-y Video?

March 31st, 2008 at 10:01 PM by Matt Freedman

Is ShoeMoney’s April Fools joke this year just simply a Video titled “Making 1000 in 1 Hour“, where the audio is inaudible in all the “right” places? Pretty weak if it is.

Although, maybe this is link bait to get him an extra 1000 hits in an hour? Or maybe for him to make an extra $1000 indirectly from the video by just putting in 1 hour of work on it? Probably not, but it’s quite possible.

Video’s posted after the break.

Click here to view the video »

Matt Cutts Not Doing An April Fools Joke This Year

March 31st, 2008 at 8:53 PM by Matt Freedman

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…

Apple Fools: Google Australia gDay with MATE

March 31st, 2008 at 8:43 PM by Matt Freedman

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.