Google decided to be a part of the "Lights Out San Francisco" event that invites "the entire city of San Francisco to install one compact fluorescent light bulb (CFL) and turn off all lights for one hour, from 8:00 pm to 9:00 pm PDT" today, October 20. To promote this event, Google's homepage changes its background color from white to black. You should see the change during the day if you are in San Francisco.
"Given our company's commitment to environmental awareness and energy efficiency, we strongly support the Lights Out campaign, and have darkened our homepage today to help spread awareness of what we hope will be a highly successful citywide event," says Google in a page set up for the event.
Google also explains that, contrary to other opinions, permanently changing the background to black would not save energy. "To the contrary, on flat-panel monitors (already estimated to be 75% of the market), displaying black may actually increase energy usage."
{ Via Geeked.info }
I think it is very commendable of Google to help save the environment, if only one hour at a time. I'm sure there are other companies that are doing what they can, but today I am focusing on Google and I applaud them. Now, my question is, what can they do for small towns? I propose a way to get many more involved and that can be to duplicate this weekly. (I propose every Friday.) The first Friday, duplicate what they did with San Francisco with every town that begins with A. That would be a skip and miss, but as they get to the letter Z (52 weeks later), they will have affected each town dwelling individual in a positive way.
ReplyDeleteGreat effort I think everyone should participate and turn off lights, the whole world can be involved. It will be interesting to watch Googleplex and San Francisco in Google Maps.
ReplyDeleteIt would be nice if:
ReplyDeletegoogle makes a page for events like this and let other people join the page by for example logging to an account and display their names on the page . something like a demonstration but online .
If I was working in google I would create the "Google Park" page and let every one's name appear on it in events.
Black is too harsh on my eyes; after a while of reading i can look away and see the black with the text outline.
ReplyDeleteI use the combination of stylish and Valacar's Userstyles to get a nice grayscale look on a lot of my web pages that i frequent. The darkened google logo has also been rewritten to change to the goog logo that goog puts there during holidays or other special times.
It a great effort in making a home page in black.. tat will reduce the power ..
ReplyDeletein mega.. watts..
so it has to be widely communicated to world..
Really, I could care less about saving energy...How about saving my eyes from the strain of being beemed with whitescreen (like having flashlight in eyes) sure i cold use some kind of script editor like grease monkey ect.. but why isn't this an option to easily selct under my preferences google screen..Black backgrounds have all my life been preferred for easier viewing, used to change script on my Amiga too old to bother any more though, I no longer use google as my homepage because of this lack of user friendlyness!!!!!
ReplyDeleteI think it's a great idea for Google to help contribute to saving energy. Even though it doesn't make a difference whether the screen is black or white it helps raise awareness to environmentally conscious people and industries.
ReplyDeleteGO Google, GO!:)
Personally I don't like the lights out look of the google homepage. Wish they would change it back soon.
ReplyDeleteWho really cares about the environment anyway? People just think it's "Cool" the be E-friendly. Way to be UNIQUE....
ReplyDelete