It’s fake but funny: Google Xistence is a new type of social aggregator whose goal is to “live your life for you.” It does this through “randomly generated status updates, picture uploads and tweets,” so you can spend your real life doing more of exactly what you secretly want to do: playing World of Warcraft and Tower Defense.
The prank site’s spoof YouTube instructional video is below, letting you know that Xistence “even sends you weekly e-mails, so you know what happened in your real life, should anyone ask.” The tagline leaves us with, “Because life is too short for social interaction.”
Google proper is apparently none too happy with the existence of Xistence, it seems — it has added it to the official list of phishing sites that browsers Firefox and Chrome poll before proceeding to render a web page. This results in a roadblock-type forgery message being displayed as shown in the screenshot below.
The individual responsible for the Xistence parody, Australian web designer Philipp Drössler, says the site was “neither a scan nor a phishing attempt.” The box displayed on the site portending to solicit a Google username and password wasn’t an actual web form, meaning visitors could not have entered text there even if they had wanted to. Meanwhile, Google is tight-lipped on why the site ended up on the phishing list, with a spokesperson saying the company is unable to “comment on sites that are not affiliated with Google.”
