April Fools! Opera’s Face Browsing, Google’s Social Network AI Creature

While cruising through my InBox looking for CTIA news, I ran across a news release from Opera Software, scrappy Norwegian purveyors of browsers, announcing the introduction of technolog for face-gesture controlled Web browsing. That sounds newsworthy, I thought–for about 10 seconds.

The first clue was the goofy looking guy in the demo video. You just don’t see folks like that in tech news releases (although I guess you do see them in Apple ads).

The second clue was the hand-drawn same face gesture controls, parituclarly the ones involving sticking one’s tongue out.

Sealing the deal: The “known issues” section, which included such items as facial hair (i.e. having a beard can mess things up) and sites with adult content (hard to control one’s facila expressions to avoid inadvertent browsing). Thanks for the chuckle, guys!

Thanks too, to Google, for CADIE (Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity). The link on Google’s main search page takes you to a news release filled with long-winded tech gobbledy-gook, but you might want to cut to the chase and head directly to Cadie’s Blogspot-hosted Web site. If you do, be sure to turn down the volume of your PC audio–or better yet, wear earplugs.

While’s you’re at it, be sure to check out PC World’s own contribution to the day’s merriment — the Facebook pages we’d like to see, including Bill Gates’ (he just “bought Azerbijan!”) , Steve Jobs, William Shakespeare (don’t call him Bill), Dr. Manhattan and others.