But unlike those Easter eggs, the ones in Hangouts should pop up when users will least expect them, yet will be most delighted to see them. After all, the search engine is known for having similar shticks: Googling ' askew,' ' recursion,' and sundry other words triggers special effects. 'We wanted to delight a broader audience by triggering on expressions people actually say.'Īdding the new Easter eggs to the already stacked line-up of ponies and shy dinosaurs makes Hangouts another Google product with tricks up its sleeve. 'The original set of Easter eggs were a bit.cryptic,' Mavinkurve told me. How often does someone randomly type '/' followed by 'ponies' or 'shydino'? To remedy this, the team removed the forward slash and created triggers instead for common phrases like 'yay!!' and 'hahahaha' in the new pack of animations. This first set was hard for users to find. It seemed a shame to not have such an emoji, so we added the Easter egg. We had Hangouts users mistaking one of our emoji (the house with the tree) for a shy dinosaur hiding behind a house. So, it became a custom on the team to send “/bikeshed” to each other, meaning we were spending too much time on trivial items and needed to focus on the important stuff. Our team is dedicated to moving fast and staying focused on our priorities. The colors for “/bikeshed” are selected at random for each person in the chat, so it's very unlikely any two people will ever agree on the color of the bikeshed. This is an ironic reference to bikeshedding. Pitchforks bring a little snark and balance out the sunshine and rainbows from our Ponies. Our team was joking about this one night before a launch, and the next thing you know, it was built into our code! And, because one pony is never enough, we even took a survey of team members for their favorite colors, and generated customized ponies for each of them in “/ponystream.' There is a popular meme out there about wanting a pony. Ponies (/ponies) and Ponystream (/ponystream): Or, try my favorite from the older pack of Easter eggs: Enter '/ponystream' into your message box, and you'll see ponies gallop across your window, like so:

(Make sure you have the latest version first.) Type and enter any of the following commands: 'hahahaha,' 'lmao,' or 'happy birthday.' Watch as an animation shows up on the bottom. To see all this whimsy in action, open up a Google Hangout window.

The older ones, found by avid chatters in 2013, involve more complicated keystrokes and trigger strange-but-colorful animations, including one with the ponies that look like ones from My Little Pony. The newest ones I've found are the bottom-of-the-window animations triggered by certain phrases (see also: 'woot'). There are other Easter eggs, and there are many of them. It's not a glitch: The gumdrop-shaped goober is simply an animation Hangouts designers threw in as an Easter egg in the app's latest update, appearing whenever you type the phrase ' hahahaha.' No matter the location, the adorable animation shows up on cue. Other times it pops up in the bottom left (or right) corner of my window.

Google hangouts easter eggs 2019