Technology Story

I check my Gmail all day long. It’s almost like gambling for me I guess, sometimes I just hit refresh and wonder why no one emailed me… I know, I need help. But this morning I was rewarded with a nice April Fool’s gag from the Gmail team at Google.

It was been a while since I saw an online April Fool’s joke that made me smile like this one did. Gmail opens with an announcement that they are now offering you the ability to change the time when the email you are sending would get to the inbox of the recipient. You need to send a report to your boss, but you missed the deadline? No problem, just set the email to get there last night. Can you imagine for a moment what would happen if you could actually send emails with timestamps that predate when you actually hit send?

There are some reasons that we trust email. Yes, it is true I can change the timestamp on my computer, but the email server that sends it also places a timestamp on the email, so you know when it comes through. If you had no idea when an email had actually been sent maybe we would stop sending them in the business environment; maybe not though.

Google does a lot of fun stuff on April Fools day, from Google Romance to the Google Wake-up Kit and gDay, which allows you to search the future. The Wake-up Kit actually flips your bed foryou, just incase you are a really sound sleeper I guess.

Maybe next year Google will announce they have created our new overlords are they are taking control of the world governments.  Maybe that isn’t an April Fool’s joke though.

Matt