It's April 1st again and that means there will be stupid pranks, fake news and lots of links that turn out to be RickRolls. Many people are annoyed because April 1st has become overdone on the Internet. There is a lot of truth to this. It can be difficult to determine what is real and what is not. There are also a lot of jokes that suck - but it is only one day and it will be over soon. Below are a few Internet April Fool's Day highlights - both good and bad. If you want a longer list check out Wikipedia's exhausting list of April 1st jokes.
The BBC's Flying Penguin's - this one is the best April Fools' joke out there this year. You can watch the video here or below. The video is also aviable here. This one has been well-received on Twitter.
CNET has TechCrunch acquiring TigerBeat and renaming it CrunchKids.
Google and Sir Richard Branson launched Project Virgle and plan to colonize Mars. See also the Google Blog announcement.
TechCrunch is suing Facebook for $25 million. Meanwhile, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg will be hosting SNL.
Catch up on your old email with Gmail Custom Time. You can only send mail back in time as far as 2004. "Gmail utilizes an e-flux capacitor to resolve issues of causality."
ProBlogger has announced the launch of PayPerTweet. Now you can finally make money from all that time you spend on Twitter.
Scribd will scan all your documents and publish them on the Internet for free. (via Boing Boing)
It is difficult to take much news seriously today with all the fakes and jokes being published. April Fool's seems to take on a special meaning in the tech world. As TechCrunch explains Google takes April Fool's Day very seriously and always comes up with something. Here a few April Fool's highlights as well as links to more April Fool's resources.
Gmail Paper: Google's Gmail Paper gag would have your printed emails arriving by the truckload. "You can make us print one, one thousand, or one hundred thousand of your emails. It's whatever seems reasonable to you." The printing and postage costs will be offset with huge ads: "The cost of postage is offset with the help of relevant, targeted, unobtrusive advertisements, which will appear on the back of your Gmail Paper prints in red, bold, 36 pt Helvetica."
Google also has the free in-home wireless broadband service from your Toilet Internet Service Provider (TiSP).
WiiHelm: For gamers, ThinkGeek is offering the WiiHelm where you move your head around instead of the wiimote. There's a goofy video as well. This may be the best joke this year.
LivePoke: Facebook had a series of fake news feeds. One read, "Introducing LivePoketm! Facebook will dispatch a real live person today to poke a friend of your choice."
TechCrunch announced that they had acquired the assets of F***edCompany.com which would have been interesting had it been true. For those who don't remember the F***edCompany.com website kept tabs on the web companies that were sinking during the days of the dot-com crash.
Starbucks on Twittervision. Online Media Cultist blogs about the giant Starbucks logo that appeared on Twittervision early this morning. It's gone already so if you didn't see it you've missed it.
Cows 2.0: Skype for Cows: "With illiteracy such a problem among cows, Skype is partnering with IBM for moo recognition of Skype commands. Students at the Open University in London are developing moo-to-text conversion."
The Matt Cutts blog was hacked prank: "The Dark SEO Team has had a bit of a beef with Google's Matt Cutts from back in 2005 over URL hijacking. Looks like they've pulled a prank on him today. Matt's blog is down, hacked -- and archives wiped out as well." See also CuttsCon: A Celebration of Madness.
The MMORPG blog lists some of the April Fool's jokes in the World of Warcraft. They write, "The entire World of Warcraft has gone mad. Today being April Fool's Day, madness has spread from the WoW forums to the Azeroth itself. Who said Blizzard doesn't have a sense of humor?"
The Top 100 April Fool's Jokes of All Time. You've gotta love
that Spaghetti Harvest that fooled people into wanting spaghetti
trees. Taco Bell buying the Liberty Bell is a good one as well.
Technorati's Search Results have included Emo, Microsoft Bob,
Blah blah blah-o-sphere, OMGROFLOLWTFBBQ!!1!, Next busy Disney,
Cheney 2008, Pointcast and Steve buys Steve.
Scoble is leaving Microsoft to work at Google. Jeremy Zawodny is also going to google. Matt Cutts is leaving Google for Yahoo. Jason Calacanis is leaving AOL for Google.
These are all April Fool's fakes. But those hot new designer sunglasses for flies -- those are real. This list of April Fools goofs just scratches the surface. Wikipedia has
tons more.
