My new blog is at http://blog.verani.net. Please do this; I don’t want my new blog to die, because all my old visitors are stuck in the old one…

Regards,
Ioannus de Verani
http://blog.verani.net

My new blog is powered by Blogger, and I am doing my best to make it look kind of cool, like this one (Blogger has awful templates!).

So please, update your bookmarks with my new blog: http://blog.verani.net/ , and update your feed reader with my new feed: http://blog.verani.net/feeds/posts/default.

On another note, because I am using Google Apps for Your Domain, I have user account to kill. If anyone would like theirname @ verani.net, please email me at verani [at] verani.net, or just comment on this post. Perks of having a verani.net email? A really cool header logo…

So, check out my new site!

UPDATE: Haochi has since expressed his apologies [see comments]

Haochi Chen of Googlified (no link!) must have a sick mind, to play such mean-spirited jokes upon the minds of extremely gullible people such as myself. You too, Philipp Lensson!

Was this funny to anyone?

Well, this extremely well crafted hoax did one good thing for me: the posts I wrote about it, thinking it was real, made record hit-rates for my blog (369 in 24 hours is a lot for a small blog like mine).

Maybe I will cool off later; if I do, I will add Googlified back into my feeds .

Alas, maybe next year, I'll come up with a trick by the 28th of March, and maybe I won't get fooled by any of you meanies (Philipp Lensson, Haochi Chen, I am talking to you…).

Well, so long, and good night.

I will probably get flamed for falling for an April Fool’s Day joke, but I really believe that this one could be real.

Let’s suppose for one minute that the Google Drive is real thing and that they are now letting the cat out of the bag. Who do we know that is associated with Google Drive? Two people:

• Niniane Wang and
• Mark Ayzenshtat

Niniane Wang is supposedly the leader of the Google Drive team. Mark Ayzenshtat is supposedly the product manager (this information is taken from the post that was taken down from the Official Google Blog and the post that is still there on the Official Google Drive Blog).

In order to prove the occupations of these two people, what better place to look than their personal homepages? Check it out:

Both their pages say that they are working on a confidential project.

Moreover, they both have a history of working on some pretty high-profile google products; Ms. Wang worked on Gmail and Google Desktop, and Mr. Ayzenshtat worked on Adwords. If we read further, not only were they both working on big projects, but they both were in advertising-related projects (Wang lead the team for Gmail advertisement). Is it possible that the two are now working upon monetizing Google Drive?

Or… maybe it is just an April Fool’s Day joke.

Tags: google, drive, april+fools+day

Strange, huh?

I wonder if something is wrong with wordpress? 

More and more evidence is coming out to support the existance of a real, Google Drive. First there was when Greg Linden found a site for GDrive on Google’s servers, which was taken down soon after:

Then there were the intercepted powerpoint slides that talked about the Google Drive:

Store 100% of User Data

With infinite storage, we can house all user files, including:
emails, web history, pictures, bookmarks, etc and make it accessible
from anywhere (any device, any platform, etc).

We already have efforts in this direction in terms of GDrive, GDS,
Lighthouse, but all of them face bandwidth and storage constraints
today. For example: Firefox team is working on server side stored state
but they want to store only URLs rather than complete web pages for
storage reasons. This theme will help us make the client less important
(thin client, thick server model) which suits our strength vis-a-vis
Microsoft and is also of great value to the user.

As we move toward the “Store 100%” reality, the online copy of your
data will become your Golden Copy and your local-machine copy serves
more like a cache. An important implication of this theme is that we
can make your online copy more secure than it would be on your own
machine.

Another important implication of this theme is that storing 100% of
a user’s data makes each piece of data more valuable because it can be
access across applications. For example: a user’s Orkut profile has
more value when it’s accessible from Gmail (as addressbook), Lighthouse
(as access list), etc.

Then, there was the post on the Google Blog that was quickly taken down this morning:

We Will Drive You Crazy

Posted by Niniane Wang, Google Drive Team

Here
at Google, we’re always looking for new ways to improve technology.
Sometimes, this means thinking a few steps ahead of what the
competition has to offer at the time. When we released Gmail on April
Fool’s day, 2004, some of you weren’t too sure whether to believe us or
not: an email client that came with 1 GB of storage.

Today perhaps, you won’t believe us again. Instead of 1 GB, you’ll get 50 GB — of completely free storage. Google Drive
is Google’s latest effort to organize the world’s information and make
it universally accessible to you — the user. Now you can store your
vacation photos, your home videos, your text documents, ZIP and EXE
files, and anything else really… and access your data from anywhere.
And if you do believe us, please sign up for the private Beta invitation today and learn.

Perhaps what happened was that Niniane posted it, thinking that she was authorized to, and then she took it down when she realised her mistake. Or maybe they are teasing us, by putting things up, and taking them down.

The last straw was the new blog in the Google Family, the Official Google Drive Blog. Here was posted the following (a pic, in case they take it down):

Aghhh… It looks real, but DO WE KNOW?

So, what would the GDrive look like? Philipp Lenssen of Google Blogoscoped thinks it might look something like this mockup:

(click to see bigger!)

A while ago, Philipp actually got ahold of the GDrive client:

So, when are they actually going to tell us what it is????? I want it!

References:

• Google Blogoscoped
• Googling Google
• TechCrunch
• Maybe some others

Next year, I hope that I will not be as gullible as this year, and perhaps I will come out with my own AFJ, but until then, I will just be drooling over the thought of a shiny, white, non-glare, easy-in-the-sun, expensive, apple-branded e-book reader………

I will continue to do my best to pump out interesting posts. Good night!