Google Fools Us All: Google’s 2012 April Fool Jokes

Every year, we all wait for what Google has to offer on April Fool’s Day. Last year, Google showed us that we can Teleport, we saw Google Motion, and were introduced to Chromercise. We’ve also seen some Google April Fools jokes become a reality.

This year, there was no exception. Google continued delivering April Fool’s jokes all day. Let’s have a look what Google had in store for us today (in case you missed some).

8-bit Google Maps

If you went to Google Maps today, you may have felt you went back into time when the first colour video game was released. Google showed an 8-bit map of the World.

Gmail Tap

Writing a message on your phone using 26+ keys can be a challenge and time consuming. But thanks to Gmail tap, you can write all your messages with only pressing two buttons. It also provides an option to allow you to send two emails at once – a great improvement over speech to text technology where you can only send one message at a time. Visit Gmail Tap to find out more.

Google Fibre

No, it has nothing to do with the NBN, but it does have something to do with what you eat. So Get Google Fibre today.

Go Ro?

There are millions of mobile devices, but dozens of rotary phones. But those using Rotary phones will have trouble visiting your website. So learn why optimizing for Rotary matters.

 

Click-To-Teleport

I remember making a comment a while back in a competition by Virgin Mobile (see my comment here). It appears Google has been stalking me – I’m sticking with that, rather than saying it was a co-incidence, but Google has introduced the Click-to-Teleport Extension. This allows you to teleport directly to any business you want to visit. So say goodbye Google’s Driving Directions. Nevertheless, a great way to drive more customers into the doors of your business.

Google’s Advance Search

Sometimes it can be hard to find what you are searching for on Google, so Google added to the Advance Search and called it “Really Advanced Search”. Really Advanced Search gives you so many more fields you can fill out to really find what you are looking for.

Google Street Roo

Exploring the Australian Desert would be a tiring task for people – it’s just too big. But thanks to this great invention, we can now all see the Australian Outback. “The Australian Outback, brought to you by thousands of jumping Kangaroo’s with 360 degree cameras on their heads.” Read the full article on the Official Google Australia Blog.

A new way to multitask

It’s true! When we use a computer, we are only using 50% of our available hands. So what Google Chrome Multitask Mode allows us to do is to browse the web faster with two mouses. So you can get twice the amount of productivity in. Want to try out Multitask mode? Just visit this link.

 

Google TV Click

Welcome to the new way of watching TV. Forget 3D TV, forget social media integration, and say hello to Google TV Click. Google TV Click allows you to interact with the shows and movies that are playing. It gives you control of the storyline and the actors. TV viewing has just reached a completely new level.

 

The YouTube Collection

Don’t really like watching YouTube online? The YouTube Collection is all of YouTube on disk and delivered to your door weekly.

 

Google Racing

It actually looks quite believable, and could possibly be another April Fools reality. But who knows, but maybe in the future, Racing might not involve a driver, but a coder to program a driverless car – the best coder wins. You can visit the Google Racing site here.

Change the Weather

Not a big fan of todays or the next few days’ weather? Don’t worry, Google will let you change it to however it suits.

Jargon-Bot for Google Apps

Being a developer, we have to be able to talk technically to other developers and talk in plain English to consumers, but for many, this can be difficult. But thankfully, Google has just launched Jargon-Bot for Google Apps. The App translates business jargon into plain English. So now, everyone will be on the same page.

Google Voice for Pets

That’s right! We can now call our pets thanks to technology that records audio directly from their vocal cords. If you pet likes sending SMS’s instead, a tiny inbuilt micro-LED emitter can project a keyboard to the floor. The other great feature is that Google Voice for Pets has an inbuilt transcription engine to translate meows and barks into plain English. But for some of us, we will still like the voice translation the other way so our pets do what we tell them too.

 

So what was your favourite Google 2012 April Fool’s Joke? Did I miss any?