Mountain View — Continuing an April Fools’ Day tradition, Google and Virgin have joined in a co-venture called Virgle to settle humans on Mars by the year 2050.
April 1 in the technology sector is at all times fun. Who can forget Opera’s 2005 press release about a “short- and medium-range interpersonal communication” technology “enabling users to communicate in real- time without the use of computers or mobile phones”?
Having organized the world’s largest information, Google has decided to embark upon time and outer space. That is the new direction the company took Tuesday, with a new Custom Time feature to send e-mails into the past and its Virgle co-venture with Virgin to colonize Mars.
With e-mails in to the past, you may perhaps buy Google stock for less or forget your anniversary. And even Virgin’s Sir Richard Branson joined the hijinks by calling Virgle an “interplanetary Noah’s Ark.”
Just exactly the Google logo feels bound to dress itself up on holidays, so the search giant, whose day job is to make sense of information, decides on this silliest of holidays to sound sensible while being silly.
But the April Fools’ Day pranks at Mountain View went well beyond Gmail. Google’s home page provided a link to “Virgle,” a fake alliance on an “open-source” Mars expedition between the prank-friendly dot-com and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic. “Earth has issues, and it is time humanity got started on a Plan B,” the site explained.
“So, beginning in 2014, Virgin founder Richard Branson and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin will be leading hundreds of users on one of the grandest adventures in human history: Project Virgle, the first permanent human colony on Mars.”
Those who consider they are qualified candidate to jump-start the project can take a spurious application with questions like “If I was unexpectedly confronted with the emergence of a bewilderingly alien and frighteningly advanced Martian life form which appeared bent on killing me if I failed to quickly and effectively communicate my peaceful intentions and potential value to its civilization, I would…”
The interface is characteristically easy. You just “set custom time” from the Compose view. “Any e-mail you send to the past appears in the proper chronological order in your recipient’s inbox,” the announcement says. You even have the option to make it look as if the recipient just forgot about your missive, by allowing the e-mail to be marked as read or unread retroactively.
“Forget your finance reports,” Gmail suggests. You can even “forget your anniversary.” Google will “make it look like you remembered.”
The information about “Project Virgle” comes along with an application for interested “pioneers” and a video starring Page and Brin in which they look like they’re having a lot of trouble keeping straight faces.
Other Google divisions joined in the April Fools’ Day fun, too. The links to featured videos on YouTube’s home page all directed to the music video for Rick Astley’s 1987 pop song “Never Gonna Give You Up,” which became a geek-culture phenomenon over the past year as the “Rickrolling” prank.
Google is not alone in cashing in on the holiday spirit, though. Security software firm Sophos has created a bogus facial recognition technology that can use a webcam to determine if a computer user is a hacker, based on distinctive facial traits.
“With our new solution that can identify key physical characteristics, we can literally see when someone has hacker written all over them,” said technology consultant Graham Cluley.
Google’s exaggerated hoax, which consist pages of explanation and a YouTube video featuring Messrs. Brin and Page discussing the project, is not the first April Fool’s ruse for the search king.
The Mountain View, California-based firm’s April Fools’ stunts date back to 2000, when the company unveiled MentalPlex, a search technology that “reads” the user’s mind to determine the query subject.
In 2005, Google unveiled the Google Gulp, a drink that could expand one’s intelligence, and in 2007 Google introduced Gmail Paper, a free service that would convert email to print and send the letters via snail mail.