Happy April Fools' Day!
As expected, Google's Gmail rolled out a fake "custom time" feature, which purports to let users send e-mails into the past and consequently never miss important deadlines again. The new feature "utilizes an e-flux capacitor to resolve issues of causality," Google wrote.
"I just got two tickets to Radiohead by being the 'first' to respond to a co-worker's 'first-come, first-serve' email," a fake testimonial on the Custom Time site read. "Someone else had already won them, but I told everyone to check their inboxes again. Everyone sort of knows I used Custom Time on this one, but I'm denying it."
April Fools' Day is something that the Gmail folks take very seriously--the product's real beta launch was, in fact, on April 1, 2004.
What, where's Bono and Project Red?
But the April Fools' Day shenanigans at Mountain View went well beyond Gmail. Google's home page provided a link to "Virgle," a faux collaboration on an "open-source" Mars expedition between the prank-friendly dot-com and Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic. "Earth has issues, and it's time humanity got started on a Plan B," the site explained. "So, starting in 2014, 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."
The information about "Project Virgle" was accompanied by an application for interested "pioneers" and a video starring Page and Brin in which they look like they're having a lot of trouble keeping straight faces.
I actually thought the time changing feature was real. I get emails from the future all the time (spammers make the emails from 2080 so they stay at the top of my email list) so I don't see why you couldn't change the time stamp to make it earlier.
The Mars coalition was obviously a joke though.
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