Gmail Down: System Failure or Genius Marketing Ploy?

The Internet has been buzzing with the news that one of the largest web services on the web, Gmail, is down. Just a few hours ago TechCrunch wrote an article about how this news was crippling Twitter. They estimated that during that time there were 10k twitter posts being generated every minute containing the word "gmail". Can you imagine how much publicity this is generating for the email powerhouse? This is Twitter alone. Doing a search for "gmail" on Google News and limiting the results to the last 24 hours we get back 16k results. It's insane how newsworthy this is.

There are some really bright minds at Google. They have some of the best engineers in the world, but Google realizes that their engineers can't do it alone. Google has been hiring top notch management and business professionals all the while. I wouldn't put it past some young MBA, trying to make a mark for himself, pitching the idea of a fake outage for sheer publicity. Sure, its bad publicity, but as we all know - there is no such thing as bad publicity.

Google has a history of timing their press releases and public events at crucial moments. Take for instance the launch of Chrome OS right before Microsoft launches Office in the Cloud, effectively stealing their thunder. They also conveniently started sharing information about Google Squared before it was even launched in an attempt to steal the limelight from Wolfram Alpha.

Google may seem like a clumsy, brain filled company, but they know what they're doing. Eight years of recruiting the best talent from Stanford and other hotbeds of brilliance has kept them sharp and creative, and I think their marketing team just maybe had a moment of glory, at the expense of their engineers.

Google Maps Street View Comes to Hampton Roads

Ok, Google Maps is becoming entirely too useful. They have steadily been adding new features and content to the service, all the while fine tuning. When Street View - a service that provides 360 degree panoramic street-level views - first came out about a year ago, I thought "Ok, this is cool, but it will be years before it makes it to where I live." I couldnt have been more wrong.

Google Maps now offers their Street View service to the Hampton Roads area. Below is panoramic picture taken in front of my house. You can even see my neighbor's car. I must have been at work when they were taking the images. This service is just entirely too useful. Going to a new location that you've never been too before? Look up the street view and wallah, it's like you're there!

This service will also help out when your trying to determine the quality/safety of an area. Say your in the market for a new home. Sometimes the pictures of the front of a house can be misleading, so punch in the address or area of the house your interested in and you instantly know whether or not you want to live there.

If Google keeps this up, I think Yahoo Maps will steadily keep losing their market share.


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Googles Playing the Domain Name Real Estate Game

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It's April Fools Day on the Web - A Day Early?

Looks like some websites are getting a jump on the April Fool's Day jokes. Google started it all off by releasing a new "service" today called gDay that lets users search web pages a day in advance. It claims this is possible by constructing what the web will look like in 24 hours based off historical trends found in their data. It does this with a technology called "MATE" (Machine Automated Temporal Extrapolation). Get it, gDay MATE! Google fittingly chose to release this service a day earlier than April 1st. Har har har. Google has had a history of embracing this jokester's holiday

Michael Arrington followed suit with a blog entry on TechCrunch claiming that he was suing FaceBook for 25 million for using his face to sell BlockBuster movie rentals on their site. I have to admit, I thought I was privy to some breaking new juicy internet gossip until I started reading the comments at the bottom. He really put some effort into this post going as far as citing California legal rhetoric.

The iPhone Dev Team who has been Jalbreaking every iPhone firmware since 1.0 is claiming to have disbanded. Apparently, this news was undetermined to be false at first but now is confirmed not to be true.

So, if it's not even April Fool's Day yet and there's already fake news popping up left and right, I think I'll be abstaining from reading news on the web tomorrow, lest I be RickRolled.