April Fools Day At Google 2011

Gmail Motion and Google Docs Motion top the list.

“To use Gmail Motion, you’ll need a computer with a built-in webcam,” explains Gmail Product Manager Paul McDonald. “Once you enable Gmail Motion from the Settings page, Gmail will enable your webcam when you sign in and automatically recognize any one of the detected movements via a spatial tracking algorithm. We designed the movements to be easy and intuitive to perform and consulted with top experts in kinestetics and body movement in devising them.”

The video at the top explains how our bodies haven’t evolved to sit and go through the motions of regular email reading. Here’s what an expert has to say about it:

Google Docs Motion is similar. You can opt-in to try Gmail Motion here.

Also from Google:

Blimp Ads

Celebrating 100 Years of YouTube

Improving finger dexterity for faster web browsing with Chrome

Michael Arrington at TechCrunch posted his own Google-related April Fools joke called, “Google Inadvertently Classifies Google Places As A ‘Content Farm’ And Removes From Search Index.” Here’s a choice excerpt from that:

The Google webspam team has made extraordinary efforts to explain that they are completely independent of other parts of Google. The fact that most content farms generate the large majority of their revenue from Google Adsense ads placed around their content has been a problem for Google. Cutts has been unequivocal on Google’s policy: “Google absolutely takes action on sites that violate our quality guidelines regardless of whether they have ads powered by Google” he said back in January on the official Google blog.

That has angered Google revenue chiefNikesh Arora, who has reportedly lashed out at the webspam team privately at various sales events for targeting some of Google’s most valuable partners. Tellingly, Arora recently returned back from a two week jaunt in the Caribbean with Demand Media CEORichard Rosenblatt, reported TMZ, where the two spent time on Rosenblatt’s new $40 million megayacht pictured left and called (I’m not kidding), The Adsense. Demand Media, worth around $2 billion, generates approximately 100% of its revenues from low quality content wrapped in Google Adsense ads…

Here are a couple tweets from Rosenblatt:

Another from Alex Jones, listed on Demand Media’s “Demanders” Twitter list:

And one from Matt Cutts:

And Nikesh Arora: