CADIE: Google’s April Fool’s Joke (2009) is More Elaborate Than It Seems
Every year on 1st of April, GMail will have some sort of April Fool’s joke. Last year was about some feature to have all your emails printed and posted to you… This year seems less elaborate and not so funny… at first. Here’s the link: http://mail.google.com/mail/help/autopilot/index.html.
However, on deeper inspection, there’s more to it! There’s a link to CADIE on the right side. But it just open a page with an error that says:
We apologize for the recent disruption(s) to our service(s).
Please stand by while order is being restored.
That’s not right…
So I searched in Google about CADIE and that’s when the whole elaborate joke came out.. hahaha. Check out this page: http://www.google.com/intl/en/landing/cadie/tech.html. Technobable that doesn’t make much sense… Not that funny.
The punch-line is in the last link on the left side to CADIE’s personal homepage… Hahahaha. Once there, just go through all links there – they are all part of the joke. Hehehe. Got me laughing! Some of the links are:
- CADIE’s Favorite Places
- CADIE-powered Google Earth
- Google Analytics Results for CADIE
- CADIE’s link to poetry (it’s in Japanese!)
- Google Brain Search for your phone
And many more! Haaha…. enjoy!
Well, here’s something else to see, also part of the joke: Chrome 3D:
http://chrome.blogspot.com/2009/04/introducing-google-chrome-with-3d.html.
In addition, go to any YouTube video and add &flip=1 at the end of the URL! For example, try this video (which is also a 2009 April Fool joke): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkjBesGaaNo&feature=dir&flip=1. Here’s the explanation from YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/t/new_viewing_experience.
Here are some more links:
- CADIE’s goodbye video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BeJ9Q40kIR0
- The YouTube channel’s here: http://www.youtube.com/cadiesingularity
- Matt Cutts’ post.. haha: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/looking-into-latest-live-metrics/
- CADIE took over a WordPress blog: http://cadiegoogle.wordpress.com/
UPDATE:
Since most of the jokes are already removed by Google, you can read a summary of them here:
FYI, CADIE’s blogspot now just points to a Google error.