So What The Heck Happened At The Google Play Event Last Night?

We’re as frustrated as you that there was no live stream of the Google Play event in New York. But why? What happened to make people get so pumped up for a non-event, so to speak? And did anything interesting actually happen, or was it all just congratulatory hogwash?

In case you missed the update on the post where we were going to put the live feed if it had actually happened, a lot of the online fervor came from a collective misinterpretation of the coverage that Geek.com put out, which first speculated that the event might have something to with the expected October 28th release of either the Nexus 5, the Nexus 10, Android KitKat, or possibly all of the above. Then their original post was altered to state that there wasn’t going to be any new hardware at last night’s event, and then it was completely removed from the website entirely.

Of course, that might have been the wrong move. You know what you shouldn’t do if you don’t want people on the Internet to be speculating wildly about something? Delete it without any warning. So a lot of people — particularly the people who are already clamoring for any news regarding KitKat or the new Nexus products — assumed that this meant the Google Play event was going to be something spectacular that none of the major tech websites were allowed to talk about. At the very least, many assumed that it was a big enough deal to warrant a live stream, which Google clearly didn’t even think to do.

Writer Russell Holly went to Reddit last night to set the record straight:

Nothing is happening tonight. There will be no live stream, no press conference, nothing. No one is coming out on stage with a mystery device in their pocket, and no one that I know has been given a N5 or N10 for review yet. For your information, while we do occasionally get those before they are available for sale we do not get them before they are announced.

I didn’t break an NDA. The Google Play team didn’t think I would react the way I did when I got the invitation, and neglected to include some kind of note asking me not to share it. I caused that team a lot of headaches this past week as a result. It was a communication error, and I jumped the gun. End of story, I promise.

That’s when the real conspiracy theorists came out to play, of course, and a lot of speculators figured that Google engineered all of this on purpose to generate buzz in anticipation for their actual release event three days from now. If that’s what it was, then it certainly worked — it seemed like the only thing a sizeable portion of Twitter was talking about for a pretty good chunk of time.

Google didn’t stay completely silent, however. On their Google Play Twitter, they took some images of the event in an attempt to gently let everyone know that they were all having loads of fun without us.

So it seems like that’s it. Nothing happened. We didn’t miss anything, except for maybe those of us who missed out on life while we sat at our computers waiting for updates. Bummer. Hopefully October 28th will not be as much of a letdown, but we’ll certainly be eyeing Google with a little bit more suspicion until then.

Meanwhile in related links

• Google modded Minecraft to include quantam physics
• They also recently converted some monorail cars into office space
• When are they going to tell us more about KitKat, though?

Have a tip we should know? tips@themarysue.com

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Victoria McNally

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