If you read this like right now and head to Twitter and search for “Chrome OS”, you’ll find over a 100 tweets getting updated by the second that Google has released a Beta Version of its Chrome OS.
The link that you see on the image leads to a Google Sites page. The which has just four pages immediately seems like a shady part of the web for Chrome OS to be made available. The Download page says this:
Chrome OS is at the beta stage. You can download the free virtual appliance of Chrome OS here:
And gives links to a couple of torrent files with other file details like the size. What’s easy to miss though is a tiny bit of line which says:
Chrome OS is not related to Google. Service provided by SUSE Studio. See the license.
So there you go, despite what people might be tweeting, Chrome OS is not out. And what you have instead is a Linux software made out of Suse. So don’t download it.
Unless of course you want to have some fun like the guys at Download Squad did. The post shows all the goof ups the scamsters made along the way to stealthily convince us that Chrome OS is out. And going by the initial reactions on Twitter they still managed to have some fun of their own.
Which brings me to the more important point here. Since I began writing this post, another 500 people have tweeted about this already. And many of them are retweets of someone’ else message without bothering to read or verify the fact. Reminds me of some of my posts which got over 60 70 retweets without any comment on the post itself.
All people had to do was go check the site, within minutes it would have been evident that the site is a fake and so is the Software. For God’s sake why would Chrome put OpenOffice Suite when it has been building Google Docs all these years. And why would Google host it on Google Sites! But people are still tweeting and installing with gay abandon.
The questions therefore are:
Is Twitter making us mere headline junkies? Is our web attention span reduced much like the 140 characters that opinions have reduced to? Is that a problem in the first place and how do we deal with it if it is?
While this may not be such a big news, it shows the vulnerability that citizen journalism and real time news tools can be prey to in future. Who is going to ensure that rumors and news are filtered and not spread as the same?
nothing new man
before this we used to sit in the verandah and gossip with the neighbours, without caring to confirm the rumours
then came the telephone
then came the email
and now its Twitter
our attention span has always been short
It’s not a fake it’s just not Google’s Chrome OS. Not sure why Suse have done this but sure as hell fooled a lot of people.