[insert false statement here, only to be refuted in the post's first line, since it's April Fool's day]

Just kidding! I would never [false statement]. I can't believe you fell for that! (Hardy-har-har.)

It has been far too long since I've written, and I do intend to properly update this blog sometime in the near future - that's what the weekend is for, right? But because it is April Fool's Day, I thought I'd share a few great April 1st pranks from around the Cloud. (Hey, maybe we'll look at this as an "Another Lazy...Thursday Evening" post? Does that make up for my absence?) Since I am, by all accounts, addicted to Google - how true it is - I will start there:

Google, Kansas? Topeka Search?: Perhaps you haven't heard that Topeka, Kansas has decided to change its name to Google, Kansas for a month in hopes that Google will choose them to be a part of their new high-speed internet network. But today, it seems that Google was so flattered they decided to return the favor (see picture above). According to the Official Google Blog:

We didn’t reach this decision lightly; after all, we had a fair amount of brand equity tied up in our old name. But the more we surfed around (the former) Topeka’s municipal website, the more kinship we felt with this fine city at the edge of the Great Plains.

Of course, this is not the first time Google has played a prank like this - and, as evinced by the few entries to follow, it won't be the last - which has included Google Gulp (Google's new energy drink), Google Romance (search for true love), or CADIE (The Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity), a computer program capable of learning and interacting intelligently with other beings. This year's list continues:

Google Translate for Animals: Perhaps you've used Google Translate before when you've been in a linguistic pinch - I know it helped me when my uncle switched his Chrome's default language to Italian - but Google has gone and taken it a step further. You can now use your Android-enabled phone to record and analyze what animals are saying to you - we've needed a technology like this for years!

Watch YouTube videos in TextP: And if you ventured onto YouTube today, you would've had the opportunity to view videos in a "TextP" format (similar to the one shown here). What's fascinating is that, apparently, showing videos in this format saves them $1.00 a second in bandwidth cost per viewer. Nuts, right?

And now, for a non-Google contributor...

ThinkGeek's Dharma Initiative Alarm Clock: I've recently become obsessed with Lost, so when I saw this YouTube video from ThinkGeek for a Dharma Initiative Alarm Clock, I nearly lost it (no pun intended). Seriously, though, punching in a code in place of a snooze button? Brilliant.

Honestly, Google should be paying me...

...for the enthusiastic PR that I've been doling out to them lately.

I've already briefly outlined my thing for all things Google: YouTube. G-mail. Google Calendar. Google Chrome. Google Bread. Google Water. Et cetera. But in the last week or so, I've discovered a few more Google services that are changing the way I operate on a day-to-day basis: Google Reader and Google Voice. (As it is very late and my linguistic and artistic sensibilities are dwindling, I will speak only briefly about each. Who knows? I may be writing more in the near future...)

Google Reader
At the risk of sounding like a late-night infomercial: If you're anything like me, part of your daily routine consists of jumping from website to website, getting your news here, your daily dose of humor there, your interesting tidbits from every-which way. Because there are so many of them, it was hard for me to remember what I have or haven't read, and for that reason, I only followed a few sites and blogs religiously. But then I stumbled onto Google Reader. I've included a YouTube video below that explains it quite well, but by way of introduction, imagine that each day, a custom-designed newspaper was delivered to your doorstep, containing all the content that you wanted and none that you didn't. It would even give you suggestions for content that you didn't realize you wanted to read. Well, that's Google Reader.



Google Voice
Google Reader is great, and it's already changed the way I use the Internet on a day-to-day basis. But this is what I'm most excited about, at the moment: Google Voice. If you could ask the people closest to me in life what I've been raving about for the past 24 hours or so, it's this. In lieu of me writing page-after-page about why I'm so excited to start using Google Voice, here's a clip:



Fair warning: Google Voice - like G-mail was in its beta phase - is currently invite-only, and these invites aren't easy to come by. You can request one from Google, but it may take time. So, if you're as excited to check out Google Voice as I am - I just got my invite, so I'll be looking into a bit more in the days to come - request early and often, and hone your patience...it may be quite a wait.