Right on schedule: Google is releasing their April Fools jokes onto us as the calendars hit April 1 on the east coast (here’s last year’s efforts). Google Australia got a head start earlier today with the very funny Future Search. Gmail’s effort this year isn’t in my opinion as funny.
Gmail Custom Time lets users send emails with a custom date in the past, putting it in the recipients inbox at the old date:
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.
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.
Funny? You decide. The team did better last year in my opinion.
But the joke has started a minor Wikipedia war, which makes it more interesting. In describing the technology Google says “Gmail utilizes an e-flux capacitor to resolve issues of causality (see Grandfather Paradox)” and links to the Grandfather Paradox on Wikipedia. Someone changed the words “time travel” to “gmail” in a revision, along with the comment “Gmail starts a wiki-war by linking directly to this article on April 1st…”
The change was quickly put down by the Wikipedia police, of course. And then changed back. And then reversed. You can watch the drama in real time on the article’s revision history page (or feel free to participate with your own flourishes).
I wonder who’ll get tired first.
I wonder if there is precedence for use of dated email in court, e.g. for proving that you were the first to come up with some implementation by emailing the implementation to yourself (of course it may be safer to file for a provisional patent) …
Yikes. Probably not.
Oh how the internet ruins April fools.
Bloggers are liars….or really good storytellers.
I just caught this and stared at it for 2 minutes scratching my head till I realized it was April 1…not very funny, last year was pretty good.
I was eagerly waiting for the Google’s April Fool app. But this one wasn’t that funny/creative as last years Paper Archive joke…
Better luck next year.
Where’s GDrive, this year?
now this one is/was really cool.
you could’ve gotten away with linking everyone to the revision history for rick roll or richard astley. 0/10
Indeed, I liked GMail Paper a lot better… this one is lacking.
http://evansnyder.com
Keep looking. Google is allllll over the board with pranks this year. Virgle. This one. Youtube is rick rolling everyone on their front page recommended vids. I’m sure we’ll find more.
what a yawn!!
rk
http://theindiastockmarket.blogspot.com/
i was actually pretty frustrated…this is actually one feature that actually might be useful…to me…
I personally like this Custom Time one. Partly because it’s a bit closer to being believable than many others. And partly because it isn’t about a buyout, merger, or employee change. Virgle? Yawn. Custom Time, with an epistemology professor complaining? Almost as insightful as The Onion.
Just a quick question, do you tag all these april fools jokes? just so we can look back on all these posts next year.. ?
For April fool, Google’s orkut also changed their logo to ‘yogurt’ which can only be seen one you log into it.
Screenshot:
http://wastedmonkeys.files.wor.....yogurt.jpg
The last year effort was good for Google TiSP.
Here’s another one from google:
http://www.google.com/googleca.....akeup.html
We just did federal discovery using thousands of ~ when I saw this, oh, the drama …
We just did federal discovery using thousands of emails ~ when I saw this, oh, the drama …
LMFAO….. I figured it all out real quick.. i was looking around online for a page that said it was an april fools joke.. LOL!!!!! Hahahahaha.. too funny!
Really, not that funny, and more than a little irksome. At first glance I thought it was about allowing scheduling emails for future sending, a feature gmail sadly lacks.
All it’s going to take is one person to semi-protect the proper pages and the wikiwar ends.
But the CNET one was pretty hilarious!
These ‘wiki wars’ are such a waste of time
I thought this was alot funnier than last years… who could have believed last years?? I am sure quite a few will fall for this year’s (if only because of wishful thinking lol)
lol this sounds so lame.
I thought this was pretty funny
Not great though. The really good ones are when I actually think it might be true… They’ve done that to me before, but I don’t remember when.
This would actually be very handy; I know I could have used this feature many times in the past few years.
It would be funnier if they implemented the feature (but only for today) so Gmail users could play April Fools jokes on friends.
It wouldn’t be difficult from a technical standpoint. We used to spoof dates and other header records for practical jokes back in the days of open relays.
SNL used the exact same joke for one of their spoof commercials 10+ years ago. It was for a FedEx / UPS type service… if you need it there tomorrow, use the other guys…but if you needed it there yesterday, use us, etc etc.
The irony is that this is actually possible. I get spam all the time that appears to have been sent in the past (often years ago).
the wikipedia article is out of control.
“Let’s try full protection for the remainder of the day.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/inde.....on=history
I thought this was hilarious, once I realized it was April 1st. Totally got me, but apparently that isn’t very difficult.
‘hi-hi’ funny, not ‘ha-ha’ funny.
Well, I think it’s funny.
Not a really great prank by itself, but think of this as an enabler for other people to pull their own email-based pranks.
It’s a meta-prank, and it’s brilliant. Also, everyone on Wikipedia is way too serious and kind of grating anyway, so it’s good to see them get wrapped up in this.
Finally a funny April fools day prank. I don’t see what all you babies are crying about.
Oh, it is funny-lighten up!
It’s was funnier than yours, find some real content to write about…. yawn….
Okay guys! Next year let’s nominate Wikipedia Main page for deletion. Then have an admin delete the page and protect it from editing for one day!
That will be the wildest April Fool’s Joke!
The Wikipedian Police will have a Heart Attack..:)
Surprised this article got Dugg. Random blogger thinks April Fools joke is unfunny? Woop-di-doo.
My cat can eat a whole watermelon, what do you think of that?
Yeh, your April Fool was almost as funny as this…
OBAMA IS GREAT!!!
APRIL FOOOLS
As innovative and as geek as gmail staff is, I absolutely fell for it for about 4 minutes. And then it made my day. Best Joke of the day! LOL
A couple others such as insideredbox did an awful job at April fool’s joke though.
At least there is still virgle
Google linked to a Wikipedia page. How is this news?
Someone edited a Wikipedia page. How is this news?
Does anyone think this is interesting?
Okay, sure, it’s not as funny as last year. But the user testimonials down the right hand side of the page were great.
I actually thought it was pretty funny.
Sure, changing the date header is completely believable. Spammers do it semi-regularly (though I suspect it’s usually misconfiguration).
It would be easy for someone who knew what they were doing to spot it, though, by looking at the full headers and the timestamps on the Received lines. Unless it was gmail-to-gmail and Google was *very* thorough about forging the dates!
From Above: “My cat can eat a whole watermelon, what do you think of that?”
That’s hilarious, Prove IT.
http://evansnyder.com
I would hardly call this a “Wikipedia war”. We see a lot more reversions on various controversial articles on a daily basis. This doesn’t even touch what Stephen Colbert did.
http://www.metalglassfurniture.com
The change was quickly put down by the Wikipedia police, of course. And then changed back. And then reversed. You can watch the drama in real time on the article’s metal glass