Google announces shutdown in April Fool hoax
01 Apr 2013
When it comes to April Fool's Day pranks, Google's pulls them like none other. Over the past years, the internet search giant had used it to come out with some really weird stuff like Gmail Paper (which, they claimed would let users add all their emails to a paper archive that Google would print on ''96 per cent post-consumer organic soybean sputum". They have also used it to offer fictitious job opportunities for a research centre on the moon.
But this year they have exceeded their best, with an elaborately produced video featuring a number of YouTube stars like the (now grown up) brothers who starred in ''Charlie bit my finger'' and David – from ''David after the dentist.''
YouTube CEO Salar Kamangar said that the site was started in 2005 as a contest with a simple goal: to find the best video in the world.'' He added, after eight years of 'accepting submissions' the site would now shut down.
The ''competition director'' Tim Liston who featured in the video said ''distinguished'' film critics, YouTube celebrities and some of the site's ''most prolific'' commentators would watch every single video on the site over the next ten years in order to find a winner. ''Your work has ended but ours has just begun. It's going to be an exciting decade.'' He added that the site would reopen in 2023, featuring only the winning video.
As regards criteria, popularity would not be a factor, with the same chance of winning for ''Gangnam Style'' as a ''man filming himself throwing bread to ducks'', he added.
Meanwhile apart from You Tube making an exit, there have been many other notable 'developments' like Australia's richest woman, Gina Rinehart becoming the new boss of Channel 10, and the Australian Financial Review bucking the downsizing trend and upsizing to a broadsheet.
Media and marketing news site Mumbrella, said Fairfax's Australian Financial Review would relaunch in a broadsheet format after 60 years in compact format, just following The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age doing precisely the opposite. It would appeal to those buying broadsheets as a ''status symbol''. The newspaper's CEO Brett Clegg quoted by Mumbrella, as saying:
"Particularly for those regularly flying between Sydney and Melbourne, people like to buy broadsheets because it sends a subtle signal to fellow travellers that they will be travelling business class and will have room to stretch their arms.''
In another announcement via a YouTube clip, Google came up with a ''treasure map'' mode for Google Maps and announced the Google Maps street view team, while diving off the coast of Madagascar last year, discovered a treasure map belonging to the infamous pirate William ''Captain'' Kidd, which contained a variety of encrypted symbols that readers were tasked with deciphering.
Google further, announced its latest innovation, Google Nose, a "scentsation" that would allow Googlers to search for smells which would be transmitted through the screen.
