I missed this last week but an interesting video is sparking a ton of discussion over on YouTube. In the video, embedded below, Mark Erickson shows how you can gain access to the Google TV private beta. In the screen shots he shows Mark streams dozens of shows for free off of Google.
The trick, according to Erickson, is to send yourself a special kind of Gmail message and then log out and log back in. I could not get his trick to work and felt a lot like a ninny in the process.
In the YouTube comments for the video some are saying that it is a hoax, others are claiming they got it to work. Has anyone been able to replicate this? Seems mighty cool if it's for real.
Centerworks has more on the purported hoax, which includes a response from Erickson himself to the allegations.Whether it's true or not it certainly demonstrates that it's much easier to launch such a hoax and influence a company's reputation.
So far, other than a few smaller sites, none of the big newspapers or trades have reported on the hoax. Seems rather odd that they haven't chased this. Even a whiff of juicy story gets hungry reporters with good contacts at Google going. The hoax itself is newsy. Bloggers so far are very skeptical.
