Author: Eric Ravenscraft / Source: reviewgeek.com
This year, April Fool’s day fell on a Sunday coincided with Easter, so you might’ve missed all the super on-brand pranks companies put out this year. We’ve rounded up the best ones in one place.
Besides your friends insisting that they’re pregnant or engaged, April Fool’s Day has become more about companies announcing fake products than actual pranks.
These “pranks” employ varying levels of humor (frequently none), but now that we’re all bored on a Monday and the companies got it all out of their system, why don’t we take a look back at the ones that at least managed to elicit a chuckle?Google’s Up First, As Always
Where’s Waldo in Google Maps: Hello, friends!
My name is Waldo. I love to travel around the globe—it’s a whole world of fun.
I’m always on the lookout for fantastic new places to explore. My last adventure started in sun-sational Mountain View, CA where I visited the terrific team at Google, including Google Maps product managers Max Greenwald and Shreena Thakore. Wow!
Google’s best prank every year isn’t a joke or fake product. It’s wasting your time. This year’s time waster is an all-too fitting Where’s Waldo game tucked inside Google Maps. The game features a series of levels with classic style Waldo pages where you can find Waldo, his friends Wenda and Wizard Whitebeard, his evil twin Odlaw, and the infuriatingly tiny tail of his red-and-white-striped tiger, Woof. Just in case you thought Google missed out on ruining your productivity because this came out on a Sunday, the game will be available all week. April Fool’s!
Google Cloud Hummus API: We’re extremely excited to share with you our latest Google Cloud groundbreaking technology: After enabling our customers to address senses through Speech & Vision API, we are now releasing a subset of Taste APIs started with a dish we all love – Hummus!
This one comes from Google Israel because yes, basically every single division of Google gets its own April Fool’s prank. This one, however, seems most likely to be real some day. If there isn’t already a Google engineer somewhere trying to deconstruct the sense of taste to analyze it and run ads against it, then there will be after today.
Google Bad Joke Detector: Once and for all, remove all the bad jokes from your phone with Files Go.
The Files Go team helps free up space on your phone by getting rid of files. In this video, they’re expanding to remove all the bad puns, wordplay, and memes that all your friends think are so funny. You’d think if it could detect bad jokes, it would be able to delete itse-[REMOVED BY GOOGLE BAD JOKE DETECTOR.]
Chromebook Renewable Charging: Chromebooks are known and loved for their long battery life, but alas, sometimes you can lose your charger. So the Chrome OS team had a few sparks of creativity to generate renewable ways to keep your Chromebook running anywhere.
You see, the joke here is that you can plug charge your Chromebook with wind or by setting it out in the sun. Or plugging it into some compost? Unfortunately, all this really does is make me wish it were actually feasible for all my gadgets to charge with solar power. I kind of resent my Chromebook just the tiniest bit now. Good prank, Google!
Gboard Physical Version: Today, we are proud to announce the new Gboard Physical Handwriting Version.
Gboard is Google’s virtual keyboard. It’s fine. Japanese, however, has a more complicated writing system with 46 unique characters for just one of its three writing systems. The Google Handwriting Input app lets you write Japanese characters, rather than memorizing where they all are on a complex keyboard.
Okay, now that you have a solid expository foundation, here’s the joke: Google Japan invented a keyboard that lets you swipe across physical keys to “write” Japanese characters. So that it’s simpler….
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