The tradition of fake news coming out of the tech world every April Fools’ Day can be a bit tiresome. \u00a0After you’ve been through a few cycles of stories about phony new products and fake M&A activity, the humor wears a bit thin.<\/p>\n
But sometimes April Fools’ jokes can get interesting — like when\u00a0a gag starts to look more like a prophesy about our changing industry or a foreshadowing of a future product or service. Here are three April Fools\u2019 jokes from this year that we think may, unwittingly, have more than just a hint of truth to them.<\/p>\n
Google is famous for pulling out all of the stops each April 1st<\/sup>, and this year is no exception.\u00a0 There’s\u00a0Gmail Blue<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0a new levity algorithm<\/a>. One of its biggest pranks, Google Nose<\/a>, actually has some grounding in real technology, as my colleague Barb Darrow pointed out<\/a> earlier today.<\/p>\n But the one that really caught my eye this year was Google\u2019s video advertisement of its fake new broadband service fiber-to-the-pole in Kansas City, where Google is building high-bandwidth optical connections<\/a> to homes and businesses.<\/p>\n \u201cWe thought a lot about what we do to enable this kind of ubiquitous connectivity throughout our fiberhoods, and we realized that the answers were all around us: utility poles,\u201d the on-screen spokesman says. \u201cI mean, we\u2019re already invested in building a fiber network using these utility poles so we thought: why not make them even more useful.\u201d<\/p>\n