Google April Fools’ Day Pranks

Google went a bit heavy on the pranks this year, with each department seeming to produce its own set of pranks.

• Google Animal Translate - Google have supposedly released an ever so sneaky version of Google Translate that can translate animal noises in to English! This is a mobile application, suprisingly for the Android platform and is (not) available in the Android App Store. Take a look at the video below.

• Google renames to Topeka – ‘Early last month the mayor of Topeka, Kansas stunned the world by announcing that his city was changing its name to Google. We’ve been wondering ever since how best to honor that moving gesture. Today we are pleased to announce that as of 1AM (Central Daylight Time) April 1st, Google has officially changed our name to Topeka.’

• Google Annotation Gallery – GAG is an open source libary for Java that allows programmers to easily express their emotions in the code… ‘The Google Annotations Gallery is an exciting new Java open source library that provides a rich set of annotations for developers to express themselves. Do you find the standard Java annotations dry and lackluster? Have you ever resorted to leaving messages to fellow developers with the @Deprecated annotation? Wouldn’t you rather leave a @LOL or @Facepalm instead? If so, then this is the gallery for you.’

ThinkGeek April Fools’ Products

ThinkGeek, a huge online store for geek wear, gadgets and generally geeky products released a few extra special products for April Fools’ day this year. This is very typical of ThinkGeek, but this year’s prank products were quite something.

• Canned Unicorn Meat – Which is… well, exactly what it says on the tin, apparently.
• iCade – An arcade machine shaped holder for the new Apple iPad.
• moodINQ – A programmable electronic Tattoo system
• Tell Me Your Secrets Bear – A cuddly bear which had a microphone and camera allowing parents to spy on their children and their secrets.

Your April Fools’ Pranks?

What was your favourite April Fools’ Prank this year, either your own or a prank you saw online?

Anyway – I’ve been talking quite a lot about Twitter recently and general social media.

I’ve said this before of course, but social media truly is great for both driving direct traffic to your website and for general search engine optimisation. Of course, different services meet different needs.

Take a look at some of the following social media related articles I’ve written recently.

Specifically, microblogging is fantastic for driving traffic to a website. The build up of following around a specific niche almost guarantees a visit from your followers, because they followed you, so they are very likely to be interested in what you have to say.

What have your experiences been using Twitter to drive traffic?

A complete success or slow progress so far? What problems have you faced when using Twitter or building up an online community following?

Graph sourced from Arbor Networks blog entry.

The main reason for Google’s huge increase in general Internet traffic was its acquisition of YouTube in 2007. YouTube delivers huge quantities of streaming video traffic, and the impressive growth of YouTube alone is enough to make a noticeable difference. Other contributing factors are massively increased adoption of other Google applications, such as Google Mail, Docs and Calendar, not only by consumers but also by mass deployment of Google Apps within businesses, as a replacement for local Microsoft exchange server set-ups.

Discretely, whilst doing no ‘evil’ (open to debate), Google has managed to push itself to the forefront of the Internet and is now a household name. Everyone knows Google.

You no longer search the Internet, you Google it.

You can click the above image for an enlarged screenshot. If you’re interested, there is more information about the BBC homepage and the new, re-branded Google homepage.

I’m quite highly anticipating the release of Google Chrome OS – Google’s net book and appliance cloud operating system. There are a few main reasons behind this.

Simplicity and Openness

Note that I combine the two here. It is very important that both software user friendliness is combined with the nature of free and open source software to prevent device and software simplification becoming a model for restricted development.

Apple do one of these well – simplicity. Apple products are almost always considered to be highly user-friendly and easy to use for all consumers, taking the iPhone and iPad as the latest examples within the consumer electronics market.

However, Apple has a very closed nature to their software models, especially with the iPhone and iPad, where all application acquisition is restricted to a specific Apple controlled ‘App. Store’ and all application developement is restricted to a Apple controlled SDK (software development kit) which is platforme restricted and incompatible with all platforms other than Apple’s own Mac OS X platform.

Promotion of Open Source Software

Since Google Chrome OS is to based upon a Linux kernel, and use many existing Linux systems, not only will this bring improvements to Linux operating systems as a whole due to Google’s code contributions, but additionally it will bring Linux and, more generally, open source software into the light.

The concepts of Linux and open source software are by no means yet the household names of Microsoft, Windows and Apple. Dependant on how Google Chrome OS is marketed by Google, this release could be a great boom for the promotion of Linux as a whole.

Zero Price Operating System

Since Google intends to release the operating system for free (zero price), it will likely also reduce the apparent worth of paid operating systems, such as the paid offerings by Microsoft (Windows) or Apple (Mac OS X). The increased use of web applications and the Internet to do many daily tasks makes Google Chrome OS perfect for the most common uses of computers today. For these tasks, alternative operating systems hold no significant advantages, whilst the advantages for Microsoft and Apple operating systems now lie specifically in the domain of platform restricted software packages, either in the desktop realm, such as Microsoft Office / Apple iWork or the server realm, such as Microsoft Exchange / Mac OS X server software packages.

Even then, with the growth of multi-platform, online productivity and collaboration tools, such as Google Docs, Google Calendar and Google Mail, these platform restricted ‘offline’ software packages may become redundant as more and more businesses and enterprises rely upon the Internet and cloud based applications and storage.

What do you think? Will Google Chrome OS be a boom for Linux, and will its competitors’ offerings be hurt significantly by its release?

"Hi! I'm Google Buzz" - Screenshot of the Google Buzz welcoming screen

Like my pun? I know, I know. It is ingenius.

What is Google Buzz?

Google Buzz is a new social networking venture from the almighty search engine. It is designed to integrate well with their webmail service Gmail. Google have dipped their toes in the social networking marketplace before with services like Orkut and Google Friend Connect. Orkut is a big hit in Brazil and India, but is not as large as many of the other social networking websites such as Twitter or Facebook. Google Friend Connect, on the other hand is a system designed for web developers to quickly and easily integrate Google-powered social elements into their websites via iframe’s, Javascript and AJAX.

From the point of large scale social networking, Google Buzz could really be a hit. It has a huge initial base of users, as all of Gmail’s existing consumer user base is automatically given Buzz as of a few days ago. Roll out of Google Buzz to consumers began on the 9th of February 2010 and has now finished being deployed for all standard public Gmail users.

Google Buzz for Google Apps?

You may be wondering if Google Apps users (Business, Schools, Enterprises or Personal) have the opportunity to use Google Buzz? Sadly not, it seems Google Buzz is not available for Google Apps users yet, but Google have promised this will be available within a few months times. The delay is apparently due to the additional complexities involved with restricted Buzz to an individual business or enterprise environment.

What about the Privacy Concerns?

There have been quite a few people heavily concerned about the privacy aspects of Google’s new social networking system. This focuses primarily across Google’s decision to make information about people users regularly contact public by default. This is done to ensure when you activate Google Buzz, you are immediately following your friends and family and they are following you. However, the people you are following is shared public. Twitter has been doing this since the start, allowing anyone to see who is following who. However, Google stores a lot more information about its users by default.

A lot of people are having doubts initially and there has been plenty of bad initial press related to the privacy of service. This is almost always the case and to be expected with all new social networking systems put online. However there are a few genuine horror stories, such as a story in which Google Buzz auto-followed a woman’s abusive ex. Is this a bad move by Google? What do you think?

Douglas Crockford selected the MIT license for his JSMin program to reduce JavaScript code syntax in such a way to make it still functionally identical but smaller in size to enable bandwidth savings when these JavaScript files are downloaded by end-users’ web browsers. Ryan Grove continued to utilise this license for his variation of JSMin called JSMin-PHP, appropriately rewritten in the PHP language. This specific license however, contains a variation from the original MIT open-source license, as it includes the following line of text, originally inserted into the license for assumed comical value.

“The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil.”

Since Google’s code hosting solution, imaginatively called ‘Google Code’ only allows hosting of code licensed under very specific open-source licenses, this single modification acts an additional condition which Google is not willing to accept. This means JSMin-PHP can not be hosted at Google Code simply due to this licensing issue.

The developer of JSMin-PHP, Ryan Groove has the following to say about this, on his blog.

“As Google (and some others) interpret it, this additional requirement constitutes a vague use restriction and thus makes the license non-free. Chris [DiBona] explained that if I were to remove that line from the license and ‘return to a proper open source license that we support,’ then jsmin-php could stay on Google Code. Otherwise, he said, ‘we can’t host you,’

… Of course, I can’t change the license, because it’s not my license. It’s Douglas’s license… All derivative works and copies of jsmin.c either include this license or are in violation of it.”

If you are using Google Code to host your project, be warned, Google are very tight on their licensing restrictions. What do you think? Valid reasoning or over the top enforcement of open-source licensing terms?

Google Chrome OS is a basic operating system built upon the Linux kernel. It uses a custom graphical user interface which is based around Google’s very fast web browser, Google Chrome. It does away with most of the regular operating system and application usage paradigms and focuses primarily on the web browser and therefore Google’s primary domains in the computer software marketplace, search and web applications.

This new operating system is initially designed to run on net book style hardware. Google have been in talks with a large variety of hardware companies and aim to have Google Chrome OS powered computers released to consumers before the end of 2010.

As emphasised in the video, Google Chrome OS is designed to almost exclusively utilise web applications and thus almost all data, excluding locally stored caches, is held on the Internet, thus promoting the use of cloud computing for data storage. With Google Mail, Google Docs and Google Calendar, Google already has a formidable cloud based productivity suite in the form of  web applications.

It will be very interesting to see how well the open-source Google Chrome OS does and how it helps in the general promotion of alternative open-source operating systems as a whole.

What do you think? Is Google Chrome OS good for Linux?

This deal will mean tweets will appear from Twitter alongside normal Google and Bing search results. Without a doubt, this will make Twitter an even larger SEO tool than it already is. Constantly the microblogging service is bombarded with spam bots attempting to promote their services, which is certainly an issue when those the tweets those bots submit provide very little in the way of useful information or news.

With blogging slowly being seen as an activity which can be done professionally, this deal could potentially open the doorway to professional microbloggers, a promotional medium which has so far been the realm of mainly automated agents (or bots) and celebrity/government public relations agencies.

Regarding this deal, Microsoft have already make a move to set up a separate, standalone search page on Bing for microblogging results from Twitter. This is likely to be a preceding step towards integrating the tweets into the main Bing search results. Google will be doing the later from the start, when its microblogging service is rolled out “in the coming months”according to Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience at Google in a recent blog post.

For both companies, this deal will mean the search engines will have direct syncronised access to the tweets almost as soon as they are posted on to Twitter’s microblogging site.