A video is going around the Internet by a Mark Erikson, who claims on his vlog "Infinite Solutions" that you can get a double-secret Google TV beta account.
Google TV supposedly will let you log into Gmail and watch any primetime show from Fox, CBS, and NBC for free (ABC and the CW are inexplicably not in on the deal...)
This has the hallmarks of a virtuoso Internet prank, complete with laughably complicated instructions to obtain your secret access via logging in and out of GMail a dozen times.
But it's produced "just so" that it puts a twinge of doubt in the viewer..
...ok, this is definitely a hoax...
...but there have been reports that media companies are talking with Google...
...maybe this is Google's clever way of generating buzz....
...stranger things have happened....
...remember how Google launched Gmail on April Fools' Day???...
...and how did this guy get rights to include a clip from "Heroes" in his vlog, anyway?...
But enough of the conspiracy theories. Mostly I got a good laugh from Eric's videos. I love the idea people out there are logging in and out of Gmail.
And if I want to watch Heroes, I can always check it out 9pm on Mondays on NBC. Or on YouTube, of course! ;-)
After the jump, the embedded videos, including Heroes...(via TechCrunch)...
The original "Google TV" video by "Infinite Solutions"...
The update, responding to accusations of a prank:
All over the world, people are waking up with strange, new powers....
eric schmidt and jerry yang at macworld keynote...liveblog
My old boss Eric S is speaking...his style is a little different - he is talking about "cloud computers" providing "html, xml, data services" - most notably says "this product is going to be hot" - really just a short little set of comments to show support.
And who comes next? Jerry Yang from Yahoo. His comments are more promoting of yahoo (as opposed to eric schmidt's more techy comments). But they are just as light, and also simply a show of support.
Having both execs on stage shows apple's increasing muscle...and that there is still consumer power in the yahoo brand (as much as they've been maligned in the past year...).
There's been somediscussion about the EOLing of the Google SOAP APIs. I worked as the SOAP APIs product manager in 2002, with Nelson Minar and another Google engineer (both of whom did a great job on many Google projects while I was there).
Some blogs have criticized the move, but I wasn't surprised. The SOAP APIs were very experimental when launched. They were never "finished", but they served as a useful prototype for other APIs Google has created. If I were still at Google recommending products whose time had come to be EOL'd, the SOAP APIs would be on the list.
While the SOAP user base was steady, the product never exploded with demand. It's somehow too complicated for the "long tail" of web designers (which the AJAX Search API seems to serve better), yet too limited for serious development.
Meanwhile, Amazon's S3 seems to be taking the next step into a real business model for Web services. Dave Winer is right that there are opportunities here for other companies like Amazon. And entrepreneurs, too.
I agree Google's EOL notice itself seemed abrupt. An accompanying blog post the day it was announced would have softened the impression (I see Google put something out today).
On the other hand, turning off new keys probably needed to happen without pre-announcement, lest a blogswarm lead to clever hackers registering 1 million API keys and selling them on eBay (or something similarly random).
However there's no good way to EOL a product people are using - criticism was inevitable. Hopefully newer and better things will come.
What I'll miss most? The cute little graphic of a robot searching with Google that was made for the launch.
