April Fool's Day Archive, Contents:

Google announced Google Nose ^Beta — allowing people to smell what they searched for online. The company explained that they had leveraged "new and existing technologies to offer the sharpest olfactory experience available," with their "street sense vehicles" roaming far and wide to index millions of different scents, thereby creating the "Google Aromabase" of 15M+ "scentibytes."


The scents were smellable by people at their computers because Google was supposedly able to manipulate the photons coming out of the screen, causing them to intersect with "infrasound waves," thereby temporarily aligning molecules to emulate particular scents.



The hoax recalled the BBC's Smellovision April Fool's Day hoax of 1965, in which the broadcaster claimed to have perfected technology allowing aromas produced in a television studio to be smelled via TV sets in people's homes.

Google debuted a new feature — Gmail Motion — designed to allow people to eliminate the use of keyboards and mice and instead write emails using only gestures, which Gmail would track using your computer webcam and a "spatial tracking algorithm." Command gestures were simple. To open a message, make a motion with your hands as if you're opening an envelope. To reply, point backward over your shoulder with your thumb. To reply all, point backward with both thumbs.

The home page for the new application featured videotaped commentary from experts such as Dennis Tooley, Ph.D. from the "California Center for Kinesics and Paralanguage," and Lorraine Klayman, M.Sc., an "Environmental Movement Specialist at Nevada Polytechnic College."

Google did note that safety precautions should be observed before using Gmail Motion. Users were advised to clear 4 feet of space around them and to take breaks every 30-40 minutes. link: Gmail Motion Beta.

The Telegraph reported that "specially trained ferrets" were going to be used to lay cables to expand broadband service to rural areas:

The Guardian announced it would become "the first newspaper in the world to be published exclusively via Twitter, the sensationally popular social networking service that has transformed online communication," thus rendering its printing presses obsolete. It also revealed an ongoing project to rewrite its entire news archive in the form of "tweets" (Twitter's text messages that are limited to 140 characters each). Examples included:

Computer experts have warned that a computer virus, the Conficker virus, is expected to activate in millions of computers on April 1st. However, exactly what it will do when activated is not known. Despite the date of its expected activation, the virus itself is not a hoax!

Google Australia announced it had partnered with the Australian rules football league to develop the gBall:

Australia's Courier Mail reported that the roll-out of digital radio in Queensland had the unintended side effect of making high-speed internet access freely available through old radio receivers. The paper interviewed the University of Queensland's head of frequency physics Prof Sayd al Lio who said, "the technicians had tapped into something that had eluded researchers for decades." To access the free internet, readers were instructed to place a radio on a surface outdoors in a direct line towards the Mt. Coot-tha radio towers:

Yahoo! unveiled an "ideological search engine." Users could select between the Democratic and Republican ideology. Democratic results displayed in blue. Republican in red.

The Japan Times profiled a new social-networking service that would provide people with instant virtual friends. The service, called TomoToday, had been created to complement sites such as Facebook and MySpace. The service claimed to "provide a short cut to a substantial social-media presence."

The virtual friends were recruited from the ranks of unemployed temp workers.

The website smellr debuted, describing itself as "like Flickr, but for your nose":

Google unveiled Gmail Autopilot, a feature that automatically reads and responds to your email, saving you the time of doing this. It boasted that Autopilot could mirror any communication style, could also work for Gmail chat, and would work even if both sender and recipient had Autopilot on:

Google Australia debuted gDay technology "enabling you to search content on the internet before it is created":

The BBC reprised its 1965 "smellovision" April Fool hoax by inviting visitors to its website to test new "sniff-screen technology" by clicking on various colored squares, pressing their noses and thumbs against their screen, and inhaling to identify the smell.

Google unveiled "MentalPlex" search technology that read the user's mind to determine what the user wanted to search for, thus eliminating the need for typing. Users were invited to peer intently at an animated spinning circle while projecting a mental image of their search request.

Red Herring Magazine ran an article profiling a revolutionary new internet technology called Orecchio (Italian for "ear"). This technology used the TIDE communications protocol (short for "Telepathic Internet Data Exchange") to allow users to compose and send e-mail telepathically. To e-mail telepathically users would wear a device nestled between their ear and skull. The company developing this device was Tidal Wave Communications, led by Yuri Maldini, a computer genius from Estonia. Adding credibility to the story was a reference to some real research at Emory University in which researchers had allowed a paralyzed man to move a cursor across a computer screen by implanting a device in his brain. Mr. Maldini, who had once been employed by the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence, claimed that he had developed the idea for Orecchio from the encrypted communications systems he had put in place during the Gulf War and the conflict in Somalia. Nevertheless, despite the revolutionary potential of telepathic e-mail, skeptics abounded. Clarence Madison, managing partner of New World Associates, was quoted as saying, "I know crap when I see it. This is crap." Ignoring such critics, Mr. Maldini was pressing ahead with his plans to commercialize Orecchio. He even was anticipating future features such as telepathic web browsers and word processors and the ability to receive e-mail telepathically as well as send it.

At the end of the Red Herring article the reporter recalled a moment when he asked Mr. Maldini how big the market for such a product might be: "Mr. Maldini falls silent. He stares vacantly for several moments out his office window and then says, 'I just sent you an email with my answer.' Upon returning to our office, we find the response waiting: 'It's going to be huge,' reads the email. 'Simply huge.'" Red Herring received numerous letters from readers admitting they had been fooled by the article.