Wednesday, April 2, 2008

Google's April Fools' Day Hoaxes for 2008

Google does have a long history of April Fools' Day hoaxes, but this year there's something different: many Google offices from outside of US have created their own tricks - to confuse all the watchers at google.com

The first permanent human colony on Mars
Google's main blog did make an announcement about Virgle. "Virgin founder Richard Branson and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin will be leading hundreds of users on one of the grandest adventures in human history: Project Virgle, the first permanent human colony on Mars." (Check this Video too)





Google Future Search
Google Australia announces gDay (a.k.a. Future Search), it is a brand new search engine that allows users to search a day in advance of real time(are u crazy!! - but it's april fool's day). Google spiders crawl publicly available web information and our index of historic, cached web content. They claim that using a mashup of numerous factors such as recurrence plots, fuzzy measure analysis, online betting odds and the weather forecast from the iGoogle weather gadget, they have created a sophisticated model of what the internet will look like 24 hours from now. Now that's Star Trek theory.

Google Docs Airplane
Google Docs comes up with a new option: create a new airplane. For now, the only model available is the one below - but that's pretty cool (makes me remember my school days):



Gmail Custom Time Option
Gmail has an extra option that lets you to change the past with Gmail Custom Time. "Just click Set custom time from the Compose view. Any email you send to the past appears in the proper chronological order in your recipient's inbox."












How about capturing a book's smell
Google Book Search has a cool new feature: capturing a book's smell. It reads as "I'm pleased to let you know that we've made some headway with one type of volume we've struggled with in the past: books employing scratch-and-sniff technology(kinda doggy). Using special equipment and tricky JavaScript, we're now able to capture some of the smells during the scanning process and then embed them in your web browser when you preview these titles in Google Book Search."











Finally we have Google Talk that's gone green
They have launched a bot that translates conversations into the IM lingo. "In honor of Earth Day (3 weeks from today: April 22, 2008), on that day our Google Talk servers will start automatically sending your conversations using IM-speak instead of normal words. We know you'll all want to practice your IM-speak, so we're helping by introducing a new translation bot, en2im@bot.talk.google.com, which will translate your conversations into IM-speak, to help you get used to the new lingo." LOL!






















So, which hoax made you giggle?

Tuesday, April 1, 2008

Factors to consider when selecting a Web Host!!

If you intend to create a few websites online, then you can think of considering purchasing an account with a Web Hosting service. Well, I would like to point out to a few factors that you need to consider before you really sign-up for an account.

1) It is reputable and reliable web hosting company?
2) Is their Customer Support is good/excellent - read reviews by visiting the forums.
3) Do you get a FREE DOMAIN - most packages now come with a free domain (your own .com / .info).
4) How big of a webspace do you get. Most offer 1500 GB or above, but do you really need that much?
5) You need a lot of bandwidth or data transfer - 15000 GB or above. The bandwidth gets used when a user visits your website or downloads a content from your site.
6) Is the web host really AFFORDABLE and cheap - when compared to the competetion?
7) Can you host unlimited domains, and also create unlimited websites under one account
8) Does it have an option for Automatic installation of scripts, Fantastico , install blogs(like wordPress) or forums in seconds.
9) Does the web host have the latest php, mysql, python, shopping cart script in place.
10) Do they also include a FREE SITE BUILDER with which you create your very first websites quickly in minutes.

You can have a look at the extended review on best web hosting at Kaushal's blog.