Google TV – An Elaborate Hoax

Michael Arrington

J. Michael Arrington (born March 13, 1970 in Huntington Beach, California) is a serial entrepreneur and the founder of TechCrunch, a blog covering startups and technology news. Arrington attended Claremont McKenna College (BA Economics, 1992) and Stanford Law School (JD, 1995) and practiced as a corporate and securities lawyer at two law firms: O’Melveny & Myers and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich... → Learn More

Sunday, January 28th, 2007

A heavily produced YouTube video from Mark Erickson at “Infinite Solutions” shows users how to get in on the super-secret (and non existent) Google TV beta. It involves sending yourself an email and then logging in and out of Gmail multiple times until a tv icon appears in the Gmail logo. In the comments to the video, some users have tried logging in and out of Gmail hundreds of times without it working.

This is almost certainly a fake, as Google Blogoscoped reports. Erickson then posted a second video to prove the authenticity and saying that Google had increased the login requirements “substantially”. A+ for effort and originality. Both videos are below.

Update: This just gets better and better. New video found via CenterNetworks “confirming” the accuracy of the hoax. This guy says he got it to work on his 114th login, after copying numerous links on the Gmail settings page.

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