This Series of Best Practices Rose to Prominence on the Internet in 2007.
Today is Friday! Time to relax, watch the video and get ready for the weekly dinner at TGI Fridays. We watched the classic Endless Solutions series of deadpan fake training videos. These knockoffs were so good that one Friday, 2007, they tricked Gizmodo .
The Infinite Solutions series will eventually become an obvious joke. I like their video above about finding the skeletons of “tiny dinosaurs” the most. This is a highly professional comedy based on several layers of jokes. Although I knew there were no real dinosaur bones at that dig site, I still cringed as I watched the master ruthlessly attack the ground with a pickaxe.
But before these obvious jokes, Infinite Solutions started with a few fake technical guides. The channel’s first video described fake use of a real-world app on CNET’s free Download.com site. Presumably, you could use this app to identify music in your iTunes library and fix tags.
Judging from the identical error messages pasted into the comments, people have actually tried and couldn’t use this method for years. Now in 2019, I can’t figure out if it was a very subtle matter or if a free music recognition app was ridiculously impossible in 2007. Now, of course, there are real applications that do this .
The video that tricked Gizmodo was titled “How to Sign Up for the GoogleTV Beta”. It was a more complex prank involving footage of a fake GoogleTV interface. What’s great is that the video prompts people to painstakingly log into and out of their Gmail accounts multiple times, hoping to catch an Easter egg that will allow them to view a GoogleTV preview (mostly free Hulu, but better). Although then-Gizmodo editor Adam Frucci was skeptical, he tried it anyway .
Frucci had to acknowledge the fake. But not because it was stupid – Google was known for sophisticated tricks like the one described in Infinite Solutions. Three years earlier, Google had released Gmail with a whopping 1GB of free storage on April 1st. You could only join if you had an invite code from someone else, so many people without a code thought it was all fake.
In 2007, Google recently bought YouTube and Keyhole (which became Google Earth). Google Books still looked like a much bigger deal than it actually was. Nobody knew what Google would come up with next. But it seemed that over time they could provide free access to all the world’s information with the addition of a few advertisements.
As such, GoogleTV was unimaginable, and hiding Early Access behind an elaborate copy-and-paste process was not entirely unbranded for Google. But the smoking gun is in the credits of the video: “Special thanks to Fatal Farm.” As Frucci pointed out in a subsequent post, Fatal Farm was already popular thanks to parodies of old TV stars . And they were behind the entire Infinite Solutions series. It’s unfair to require a blogger to search every name that appears in the credits of a YouTube video, but that could be faster than signing in and out of your Gmail account eleven times.
Anyway, Frucci posted an update that Monday , admitting that he had fallen for him (although, to be honest, he was skeptical all along), and shared a follow-up video of Fatal Farm, which focuses twice as much on cheating:
Before you head out on Friday for specialties and BBQ chicken tortillas, here’s another shiny troll from Infinite Solutions: A City Guide to New York for just $ 100. Be sure to inform the taxi driver that you need a special tourist rate.