Today marks the best day to see the humour dripping off pages of YouTube, Google, Amazon, Reddit and more. Revel in the snarky and witty April Fools jokes perpetrated by top Web 2.0 leaders.
April 1 can be one of the funniest days to surf the Web, or one of the most confusing. Web junkies have to be extra wary of breaking-news stories from popular websites. Also, some sites enjoy tweaking their looks in order to spice their company with some humour.
What April Fools jokes were scattered across the Web?
Google wasn’t lazy, creating several pranks. First, Gmail Autopilot will let you send automatic messages to those bothersome emails. The announcement reads: “As more and more everyday communication takes place over email, lots of people have complained about how hard it is to read and respond to every message. This is because they actually read and respond to all their messages.”
Here is what a sample Autopilot reply may look like:
Google also introduced CADIE, an artificial intelligence system that deduces “from a quick scan of the visual segment of the social web a set of online design principles from which she derived this intriguing homepage.”
Using CADIE, Google introduced Brain Search “to index your brain, thus improving the speed and accuracy of memory retrieval.” If only.
The description gets even geekier, but rest assured it’s just Google’s way of saying, “We’re ribbing you with this fake neuro-evolutionary learning cluster.”
YouTube got in the April Fools game by introducing upside-down videos. It explained its new system: Our internal tests have shown that modern computer monitors give a higher quality picture when flipped upside down—kind of like how it’s best to rotate your mattress every six months. You might find that YouTube videos look better this way.
But users who prefer the normal way of checking out vids can just click the link reading “I prefer the old-fashioned layout.”
We’ve all heard of cloud computing, right? Amazon took the concept to a silly level with its Floating Amazon Cloud Environment (FACE). Amazon created unmanned blimps that are each “coated in polycrystalline solar cells which supply approximately 40% of the power needed by the servers and the on-board navigation, communication, and defense systems.” Amazon went on to say, “We believe that the FACE will be the perfect solution for LAN parties, tech conferences, and large-scale sporting events.”
Social news site Reddit took a dig at, well, Digg.com. It redesigned its entire layout to mimic Digg’s front page. Instead of the “digg it” tag there’s a “redd it” tag. Funnily enough, one of the top links on this site reads “OK, funny joke reddit, now can you please take off this broken mess of a front page, it’s kind of annoying.”
Fark.com also played with its layout, redesigning to resemble a very familiar social network. Can you guess which one?
The Guardian website published an article on how it would fold its print operations. The alternative? Publishing the news solely through Twitter. The venerable newspaper will also rewrite its archive to reflect the tweet update: “OMG Hitler invades Poland, allies declare war see tinyurl.com/b5x6e for more.” Hilarious, and perhaps prescient.
What other jokes dotted the Web? Gizmotastic parodied Google News with a drone that covers breaking news for the service, describing it succinctly: “Whenever several people send out a Twitter message using the hashtag #NewsDrone, a GPS search will begin to find the location on Google Maps and route a Google News Drone in that direction.”
Comedy video site FunnyOrDie.com is now owned by Reba McEntire, complete with a name change: RebaOrDie only features videos starring the country star, such as Reba shooting a worm in the movie Tremors and Reba appearing on The View. Too much Reba, in our opinion.
Smellr is a wacky social network for, you guessed it, perfumes. Its first poll lets you vote on various fragrances, such as Isolation by Mark Zuckerberg and Focus by Kevin Rose.
The Pirate Bay, embroiled in legal troubles of its own, claims Warner Bros. is loving the torrent-heavy site. Quite a change of heart, isn’t it?
Phandroid reported on an “Android car” created by Ford, GM and Google. It’s decked out in some Web 2.0 finery: “Back seat head rests will be outfitted with Android Netbook screens and separate bluetooth keyboards will be safely tucked away in the seat pocket as an accessory.”
And in one of the ugliest examples of an April Fools joke, Gizmodo redesigned its website so headlines would read like spam messages. Yes, it’s as chaotic as you can imagine it, with “free shipping” non sequitors preceding some phrases and mangled English such as “Palm Inc, A Godly Assemblage, Would Kindly Ask That You Hear The Good News Today.” Brilliant but an eyesore.
What other April Fools parodies have you come across on the Web? Let us know in the comments below.
