Google Gulp Beta -- Sugar-Free Radical Red smart drink. Courtesy Google

Google has made a tradition of launching innovative products on April 1.

Last year it was Gmail, its free e-mail service with a gigabyte of storage. More storage doesn't sound like much of an innovation but Google's offering changed the rules and forced the dominant free e-mail providers, Yahoo and Microsoft, to upgrade their own stagnant free e-mail services to compete.

Today Google announced the beta (test) version of the Google Gulp smart drink, which comes in four different flavours:  Glutamate Grape, Sugar-Free Radical, Beta Carroty and Sera-Tonic Water.

It also announced some significant upgrades to GMail that include doubling storage limits to 2GB and a rich text formatting tool.

Not to be outdone, Yahoo announced its upcoming Yahoo! Slacker services suite, which includes:

    • Book Slacker is a full-text searchable index composed of the popular Cliffs Notes and Dummies Book
    • IM Slacker is a "parental response" IMVironment that auto-responds to your IMs from your parents with "Sorry, I'm studying..." while you chat with friends.
    • Local Slacker will find the nearest pizza and provide one-click ordering.
    • Music Slacker automatically scans Yahoo! Music and queues up any song that played on the previous night's episode of The O.C.
    • Spelling Slacker will use our Misspelling API and our vast experience in speling as a Microsoft Word plug-in to ensure you have enough of those squiggly red lines in your homework assignments.

Of course, Google Gulp is another of the company's April Fool's jokes, as Yahoo! Slacker is. If you search the Web and the blogosphere, you'll see that Google Gulp is mentioned many more times and Yahoo's Slacker service is hardly mentioned at all. The reason?

Google followed through on its prank with a mini Web site, complete with a product history, product descriptions, frequently asked questions (FAQ), and attractive graphical elements that add to the fiction.

The Yahoo! Slacker post on Yahoo's Search Blog just links to many Yahoo services and seems designed to drive traffic to those properties. I've removed most of the links from the feature list (quoted above). I've left the Misspelling API and speling links intact because they are the only ones that effectively reinforce the fiction, although the API link is probably a little too esoteric for a non-technical person.

These are viral marketing tactics that Google has executed well on and Yahoo hasn't. It seems like Yahoo's attempt is half-hearted, with no real follow-through. The result is that Google is perceived as cool, gets lots of free media coverage and buzz among the bloggers while Yahoo is left behind.

Drink Up

Granted, for an online search company a beverage line constitutes a bit of a departure. But at Google we try never to lose our focus on the user, and this year we got to thinking that the one thing missing from the perfect web-surfing experience was a cool, refreshing smart drink.

Cheers,
The Google Gulp Team