Google puts vuvuzela in mouth of Street View icon when in South Africa | Hacker News Reader

Google puts vuvuzela in mouth of Street View icon when in South Africa

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48 pointsmcantelon15 comments

I know the vuvuzela soundtrack on YouTube is silly, and this is silly too... but you know what? I like that one of the biggest companies of our time is OK with being silly sometimes.

Remember when Apple used to have fun, too?

It's not as if it's affecting anything important like Adsense/Adwords.

Oh, but it is!

I just viewed a few Google ads sponsored from South Africa, increasing the big G's revenue by some vanishingly small amount.

The first time I saw the vuvuzela mentioned in a humorous context it was funny. However, it was used in every joke for the past two weeks. It's starting to be as annoying as the vuvuzela sound.

Relax. It lasts a few weeks, then you'll practically never hear of it again.

Except that in twenty years somebody will mention the word vuvuzela and it will make you nostalgic for the summer of 2010.

Yes, I'm beginning to develop vuvuzela-hate hate as well.

I thought they did this to stick it to the Man (i.e. FIFA). FIFA tends to send out nastygrams as soon as you so much as appear to refer to the World Cup without paying them [1].

But they seem to pay at least some money to FIFA. They say “2010 FIFA World Cup” [2] on their results page, that must cost them money.

[1] Hilarious subversion of FIFA’s despotic tendencies: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=154436&id=14597658...

[2] http://www.google.com/search?q=mesut+özil

I personally did not notice vuvuzela noise, Until i saw all these people complaining online.

My wife heard a report on public radio in which a musician demonstrated that vuvuzelas can be very musical when played with proper wind instrument technique. To that, our oldest son replied that 20,000 violins would sound just as bad in the hands of fans at a football stadium.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkhJKAkau2A

Can you vary the pitch on a vuvuzela similar to how you vary your pitch on a bugle (or a trumpet without using the valves)?

They even updated the little guy's shadow. Gotta love the attention to detail.

(See lower right corner of your browser.)

Please Google, don't encourage them.

Vuvuzelas are barbaric.

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