Google is known for bringing small gifts to the users. It has always managed to amuse me. Even when they are not giving away things, they will tweak their homepage to celebrate birthdays, festivals and other notable occasions. They would even tweak the localized versions of their homepage to celebrate local festivals of that country. I remember, during the last Holi, the festival of colours in India, they tweaked the google.co.in page, which is Google’s home page for India.
I am talking about this because the internet Who Called Me from This Phone Number? giant has something to make you smile this Christmas. It can also bring a smile on the faces of your near and dear ones, or the people you choose to use it on. I am talking about Google Santa Tracker, which can be used for many a fun purposes.
Firstly, you can make Santa place a telephone call to anybody who has a North American telephone number. You can tweak your message with endless options. You can name the receiver some cool nicknames like punk, dude, geek or even “brother from another mother”. You can tell Santa what gift the receiver would like this Christmas. You can even call yourself whatever you like, of course within the limit of decency.
What if your friend doesn’t have a USA phone number? There are two options. Send him an SMS or an email. I prefer the second option. Your message will get delivered to the recipient as an MP3 in a mail. All they need to do is to click on it and the message will be played back to him/her.
There are other things to do too. There is a little item collecting game which you can play only using the space key or the side arrow keys. There is another sledge racing game with a Santa on it, where you must stay on the course and collect all the goodies scattered over the racecourse. You can play this game using four arrow keys only. These games are nothing great but will surely make you smile.
You can wander in the village which Google has created and check the gift factory, or the hot air balloon or the inn. The complete thing is made using HTML5 and JavaScript and is pretty much a 2D thing only. The popular Google products, like Gmail and other, are displayed prominently all over the places. In short it can be called the Google village during the Christmas.