April Fool's Day started early in Silicon Valley, where pranks and hoax announcements are a hallowed rite of the tech industry.
YouTube made the first big splash on Sunday night, when the Google (GOOG)-owned site announced, tongue-in-cheek, that the popular Internet video platform would shut down on Monday, after eight years. YouTube, or so it seems, was originally launched as a contest to pick the "best video ever." And now, the company said in an official-looking video, a crew of 30,000 technicians would begin reviewing all the video ever submitted -- it's been coming in at a rate of 70 hours a minute -- before announcing the winner in 2023.
Google followed up Monday with a half dozen other joke announcements, including such nonexistent products as "Nose," described as a new service that lets people search online for examples of different scents. Google said its "Street Sense" vehicles had traveled the world, collecting different aromas for a digital database of olfactory sensations, including "cabernet" and "wet dog."
But Google wasn't the only prankster in the valley. EFI, a digital printing company, issued a news release satirizing the flap over Yahoo's (YHOO)
recent ban on working from home. Starting Monday, EFI jokingly announced, a new program called "Home Share" would allow the company's employees to work from their co-workers' homes.
Other tech companies got into the act. Microsoft tweaked its Bing search engine so that anyone typing in the word "Google" was taken to a bare-bones page that resembled Google's own home page, except for a few snarky messages and an "I'm feeling confused" button instead of the "I'm feeling lucky" button that appears on Google.com.
Google fired back with an announcement for "Gmail Blue," supposedly an update of Gmail that satirized Microsoft's plans for a new version of Windows, code-named "Blue." A satirical video featured an earnest product manager who described the company's challenge as, "How do we completely redesign and recreate something while keeping it exactly the same?"
Sony also posted a video announcement for a new line of consumer electronics products for pets, including high-end audio headphones for cats and a canine television set that shows only blue and yellow, since dogs have trouble seeing red or green.
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