expertSEM

Something we SEM professionals have come to expect every April Fool’s day is the dryly humorous joke from Google. Gems of the past include Pigeon Rank and Gmail Paper, so this morning I was poking around for recent Google posts. Indeed, I found several released for the occasion, but there was one additional release that was no joke.

This was the update to Google Docs that I have been waiting for, Offline Synchronization. Is this a new strategy on the part of Google? … to disseminate real Information on April Fools Day, so people pay attention waiting for the joke?

If it is, it’s brilliant, and it got me. I sat through the whole demo, released on March 31^st, waiting for the gag. No gag, just an important update for their burgeoning document service. See for yourself if you would be able to tell real from fake without going through most of the video:

Real

Google Cloud Computing for Docs

Fake

Gmail CustomTime

Google’s gDay

Intentional or not, it worked. This just demonstrates one more crazy way that Google has monetized something that most people take for granted, the April Fool’s Joke.