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Google Mail: Prank
April 2, 2004
Welcome to TNL.net. If you like this content, you may consider subscribing to the RSS feed.Turns out it’s not a prank. I was wrong (ah, the joys of real-time publishing). Google Mail is real.
I know there’s been much confusion around the blogosphere about the announcement by Google that it was launching an email service but a closer look at the press release shows a number of telltale signs:
The mention that ” Search is Number Two Online Activity” should be a good tip off for a company that says that it is “focused on search services”.Second is the date: April 1st! If the announcement were true, why couldn’t they put a dateline of March 31st or April 2nd to avoid confusion?Third is the fact that this would have showed up either as a lab or a demo. To date, Google hasn’t done vapor wareGmail is now the first case of vapor ware from GoogleOf course, people said that the moon job announcement is the real hoax but what if the guys at google wanted to do two april fools?How come none of the stories are providing screenshots of the interfaces. If it exist, can we see what it looks like?Someone sent me a Gmail screenshot that resides on a google server and the San Jose Mercury News actually saw a demo.If it were not a prank, why register the name only for 2 years when other names are registered for longer?
In my view, if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it must be an April Fool Duck… on the other hand the weblog community seems to feel that it is a real announcement (is it vapor ware, then?)
