Google Morphs into Topeka, One of Many April Fools Day 2010 Gags

by Clint Boulton

Now, this is a more than a little cheesy, but the gist of the riff is this: Topeka Kansas Mayor Bill Bunten renamed Topeka “Google” to cozy up to the search giant over Google’s broadband initiative. We don’t know if it will work, but clearly it got Google’s attention and the company is returning the favor. When going to the Google home page before signing in, you see this.

When you visit the Googleplex in Mountain View today, you’ll see this sign outside. Quite the homage to Topeka, isnt it?

Set the volume from vibrate to loud and wait for people to come screaming at you when you have a message. Funny?—Perhaps. Obnoxious?—Definitely. Make sure to watch the video for a demonstration.

Google CFO Patrick Pichette said: “For every person who selects TEXTp and keeps it on while you watch a video, you save YouTube $1 a second, resulting in potentially billions of dollars of savings for us. So if you care about YouTube, you’ll use TEXTp today.” We don’t write these jokes, we just link to them.

Google says: “Store your keys, remotes, rail passes, and other objects you commonly lose with Google Docs, and you’ll never have to worry about finding them again.” Have room for wives in there, too? Seriously though, this is a little creepy, like the Twilight Zone where the kid wishes people into the corn field.

Starting today, go to Google.com on your phone in the U.S., search for “where am I” and wonder about your own whereabouts no more.

This one’s pretty funny if you find technology nostalgia funny. Google says: “Today, we take a first step in restoring people’s right to pager integration, unexpected beeps, caps on the number of messages that can be received, and more, in a feature we are calling Standard Voicemail Mode.”

Google says: “Translate for Animals is an application for Android phones that recognizes and transcribes words and phrases that are common to a species, like cats for example.” This is certainly creepy, with talk of analyzing animals’ “neurobiological acoustics.”

Optimize for Colloquial Cultural Articulation (OCCA) tailors products, such as Google Maps, for Australian users. Google says: “If someone searches for ‘cricket’ in Australia they’re more likely interested in the sport than the insect. With our new OCCA framework, we can now go further and tell that if an Aussie searches on ‘automatic wiki,’ they’re probably referring to the automatic wicket keeper common in backyard cricket and not an automatically updated bulletin board or ‘wiki.'”

A new way for you to identify your request as harmful—funny for geeks.

Look out Match.com and eHarmony! Google Romance is in the house, and you know what happens when Google enters a new market. It Microsofts it!

What’s funny about this is if you can’t read Japanese, click the Google Translate tool in the toolbar. The translation is hilarious! I mean, so bad that I don’t get the joke. Sorry, Google. Needs more work.

We haven’t officially seen this from Google yet, but Fast Company has evidence that “Google is planning to launch an experiment that we hope will make prisons better for everyone. We plan to test ultra high-tech incarceration facilities in one or more trial locations across the country.” Funny, unless of course, Fast is pulling a fast one on us!

Disastrous! Google says: “If you’ve logged into Gmail over the last hour (or visited the Gmail homepage), you probably noticed that something looked a bit off: all the vowels are missing. We realize this makes things difficult for all of you who rely on Gmail—whether at home or at work—and we’re incredibly sorry.”

When you visit a book in Google Books, you’ll see a new “View in 3D” option. We’re hoping this is an April Fool’s Day joke. If not, sorry Google, but you can’t be serious.

Google Annotations Gallery “is an exciting new Java open source library that provides a rich set of annotations for developers to express themselves.”