It’s that time of year again – April Fool’s Day! And the internet loves April Fool’s Day like kids love Halloween. It’s a great day to randomly surf your favorite websites, and I’ve decided to post the best of the pranks being played around the net here for those of you who have better things to do than to veg out in front of a computer all day.
CNET
“Edit wars come to spy agencies’ Intellipedia” is listed among today’s headlines. In the article by Declan McCullagh, CNet reports that, “It turns out that the federal government’s Intellipedia, a classified Wikipedia just for spies and spooks, is as prone to altercations as is its public counterpart.
The latest edit war on the top-secret Web site started with the “Best Buffy the Vampire Slayer Episode” entry, which CIA Director Michael Hayden claimed would be the acclaimed episode in which a series of human heart-gathering demons cast a spell to steal everyone’s voices.
Then, according to documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, Vice President Dick Cheney reverted the classified Intellipedia entry to the earlier version that listed the Buffy musical “Once More, With Feeling” as the top choice. “The juxtaposition of Buffy’s emotional dependence on her mentor and the interpretive dance number was deeply moving,” Cheney said. “Plus there was some serious blood and gore toward the end.”
Destructoid
The Destructoid game news site has taken advantage of the day to lampoon Fox News by creating a mock-news site that systematically blames every sorts of social outrage on video games, while exposing scandal upon scandal within the video game industry.
Google
No one really gets into the spirit of April Fool’s Day like Google. This year, Google Australia featured gDay with MATE, the Google search that looks into the future! Using MATE’s machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques developed in Google’s Sydney offices, we can construct elements of the future.
Google’s US site announces Virgle, a one hundred year plan to establish a first permanent human colony on Mars.
PC World has posted a gallery of Google’s Top 17 Easter Eggs, Gags, and Hoaxes. The article posts seventeen of Google’s past hoaxes, including Google Gulp, Gmail Paper, and Google Romance beta.
Gmail
Gmail has introduced Gmail Custom Time! Just click “Set custom time” from the Compose view. Any email you send to the past appears in the proper chronological order in your recipient’s inbox. You can opt for it to show up read or unread by selecting the appropriate option.
HowStuffWorks
Last year, HowStuffWorks featured an article on How Cell-phone Implants Work. “In November 2002, designers at the Royal College of Art in London made headlines after coming up with the world’s first cell-phone implant. Their design involved a small chip that housed a receiver and a transducer. The receiver could pick up mobile phone signals, and the transducer could translate them into vibrations.”
InfoWorld
This pillar of the news world has posted an article entitled, “Microsoft, Yahoo agree on buyout price,” in which the paper reveals the details of the “impending” Microsoft-Yahoo merger.
The Mahalo Daily
An oldie, but a goodie. RickRolling might be getting a bit wearisome, but I would bet the Mahalo Daily pulls down double its normal traffic today with links promoting a new interview with Steve Jobs.
Revision3
The video portal Revision3 is having its fun, too. For today only, all of its video are flipped horizontally, so that all of the videos’ text appears backwards. You don’t notice it at first because the website, the frame that represents each video, and the advertisements playing at the foot of the videos are all unaltered. It doesn’t strike you until you go to watch something technical, like a software tutorial, and I’m sure that, by the end of the day, the forums will be full of noobs asking what’s wrong with their browser.
The Telegraph
A colony of flying Penguins has been documented by the BBC, and the story is being carried by the UK’s Telegraph, complete with a video. You can also find the footage on YouTube.
Think Geek
Today only, you can add this Colossus Of Analog/Digital Convergence to your shopping cart at ThinkGeek for the bargain-basement price of US$29.99! “…many folks that recorded home movies between the year 1975 and about 1984. Think Air Supply, Pat Benatar, and ‘Who Shot JR?’ and you’ll get the idea. So we took a trip to Awesome Town and picked up this nifty Betamax to HD-DVD converter – at a price that shouts “Totally Tubular”. Betamax and HD-DVD are like a match literally made in heaven (you know, that place you go when you die?), and now you can get a slice for yourself.”
If you think the Betamax to HD-DVD is funny, check out the rest of Think Geek’s link of April Fool’s products, which include Defendius Labyrinth Security Lock, The World’s First USB Pregnancy Test Kit, and the ZapCam, and others.
Virgin Blue has pulled an enormous April Fools Day joke on Brisbane, Australia, promoting half-priced No Chair Fares for passengers willing to stand for the duration of any domestic flight. A thousand people actually responded to the promotion.
World Of Warcraft: Molten Core
Blizzard takes a poke at its own games that will have the older games out there laughing their asses off – particularly those who experienced Warcraft: Orcs & Humans first-hand. Also don’t miss the announcement of the new Bard class for the World of WarCraft or the Tauren Marine from Starcraft 2
YouTube
All of YouTube’s videos are RickRolling today! Sorry, I know I shouldn’t find this funny, but I do, may the Internet forgive me. With the millions of hits that video is getting today alone, poor Rick Astley could well encounter angry mobs…
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