April Fools 2008
As everyone is well aware, every year on April 1 the internet collectively goes nuts. I've compiled a list below of notable April Fools Jokes that I've found, but my list is by no means comprehensive. In addition, a good source for April 1st jokes can always be found at Wikipedia's April 1st, 2008 listing page.
- Google announces Virgle
- Gmail releases Custom Time
- Thinkgeek is now selling Super Pii Pii Brothers, a Personal Soundtrack T-Shirt, a Zap Cram Youtube Taser, the Defendius Labyrinth Security Lock, a Betamax to HD-DVD Converter, the PTeq - USB Pregnancy Test, the The NSA Mega Encrypted Tee, and Spazztroids - Caffeinated Breakfast Cereal.
- Google Book Search introduces new Scratch & Sniff books.
- World of Warcraft announces a new Molten Core Arcade game and the new Bard Heroic Class.
- For the photography fans out there, poking fun at Annie Leibovitz, is an announcement that she is moving her entire image collection to Flickr. The reason this is funny, if you do not remember the scandal from some months ago, is that Annie had one of her images used in a parody video which she sued to have it taken out claiming copyright, when it was a clear use of fair use (the image was displayed in the video for approximately .5 seconds & wasn't used for profit).
- Blizzard announded a new Terran unit, the Tauren marine.
- Techcrunch has announced they're suing facebook for $25 million in damages for using site's owner, Michael Arrington's photo on their site in promoting things (obviously making fun for Facebook's much criticized advertising program).
- Fark replaced their front page with the image of a server rack, a gerbil, and some 1337 speakpurporting that they had been hacked.
- The World of Warcraft forums had a "LOL Filter" placed on them so that as you made a post, your text would have lol-like phrases interspersed in with what you had written.
- Google Calendar featured an "I'm Feeling Lucky" button when a user created an event by clicking on the calendar; when a user attempted to create an event and chose "I'm feeling lucky" an event labelled "Date with [a person]" (Eric Cartman, Angelina Jolie, George W. Bush, Anna Kournikova, Tom Cruise, Lois Griffin, Johnny Depp) was created on their calendar.
- Google Calendar announced the Google Wakeup Kit.
- Gizmodo invoked Mr. T in all of their articles on April 1.
- Google introduces a 'New Airplane' feature in Google Docs - selecting File > New Airplane opens a new Google Document with the outline of a paper airplane.
- Improv Everywhere changed their site design claiming to have spent $4000 on it. The new design mocks websites of the 90's by including a background midi and "under construction" images.
- All links off of the homepage of Youtube.com went to Rickroll videos.
- Webcomics XKCD, Questionable Content, and Dinosaur Comics redirected visitors to each other's sites.
- Wizards of the Coast announced a new product for Magic: The Gathering, Pirates vs. Ninjas Duel Decks, to be released this year.
- Engadget, in response to Deutsche Telekom requesting they no longer use the color magenta on their sister site Engadget Mobile, colors the background of their site magenta, and slightly modifies the Engadget Mobile logo so it appears to read "Engadge t-Mobile".
- Sophos announced that it had developed a technology called RAPIL (Recognition and Analysis of Potentially Intruding Lifeforms) that could stop hackers from writing computer viruses through webcam facial recognition. Unfortunately the system does not work if the hackers are wearing hats, sunglasses, or have fake beards.