Monday, April 27, 2009

Google Maps April Fools (or is it?)

Like a lot of people I look forward to April 1st when the big companies try to pull the wool over our eyes with some lame, but interesting hoax. Google has been doing it for a few years now, with different business units coming up with something unique to the products they build. This year however, the company teamed up on a single concept: Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity (CADIE) - which is basically just an bot with Artificial Intelligence (AI) with a cutesy looking panda for a logo. This was a bit of a cop-out as all the Maps team really created was a Google My Map with a about 20 placemarks (all in America) represented with the panda icon (wow).
While scratching my head thinking "there must be more to it than this" as it's pretty average - I stumbled on this at this location when in Streetview:

Now I'm not sure if this was an unpublicised April Fools or just a Streetview glitch. It looks like your trapped in the rib cage of some weird purple walrus (or panda). And what's also strange is that a continuous section of road, just stops when you get "caught" inside the view. And even more funny is that this is near "area 51".
I'm hoping this was part of the April Fools day pranks as it is actually half-decent compared to the rest of the CADIE cop-outs.

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