April Fool's Day on the Web 2008

There are so many april Fool's Day jokes circulating round t'internet today that I thought it would be useful to collate them all into one place. This has resulted in a very long blog post, a surfacing of paranoia over which stories are real and which are fake, and a wish for next year's pranks to be less in quantity but more in quantity.

For ease of use, each prank is divided up by an introductory sentence in bold.

Enjoy them all and if you discover any more, let me know in the comments!


Google has arguably had the best pranks this year, the first being their 'Wake Up Kit':

This application from Google Docs that lets you build your very own paper airplane:

"If you create a new document in Google Docs, you’ll see a number of options in the “File” pull down menu. One of those options, which as far as I can tell wasn’t there yesterday, is “New airplane.” It’s right there after “New document.”

Choosing it opens a new file with folding instructions to build a paper airplane,"

Google also launched a 'Future Search:' enabling you to 'search tomorrow's web, today!':

Google Australia launched Gday today, a new search engine that allows users to search a day in advance of real time:

Google spiders crawl publicly available web information and our index of historic, cached web content. Using a mashup of numerous factors such as recurrence plots, fuzzy measure analysis, online betting odds and the weather forecast from the iGoogle weather gadget, we can create a sophisticated model of what the internet will look like 24 hours from now.

We can use this technique to predict almost anything on the web – tomorrow’s share price movements, sports results or news events. Plus, using language regression analysis, Google can even predict the actual wording of blogs and newspaper columns, 24 hours before they’re written!

To rank these future pages in order of relevance, gDay™ uses a statistical extrapolation of a page’s future PageRank, called SageRank.

Also announced by Google was Virgle, a joint Google/ Virgin project to establish permanent human settlement on Mars:

"Sir Richard Branson writes:

Larry Page, Sergey Brin and I feel strongly that contemporary technology is sufficiently advanced to make such an effort both successful and economical, and that it’s high time that humanity moved beyond Earth and began our great, long journey to explore the stars and establish our first lasting foothold on another world…In the years to come, we’ll be sending up a series of spaceships carrying (along with the supplies and tools needed to build the new colony) what eventually will be hundreds of Mars colonists, or Virgle Pioneers — myself among them.

Virgle is currently taking applications on its site here. The official site also includes a 100 year plan for Mars Settlement and a statement explaining the benefits of the project being Open Source."

Last, but not least from the Google camp was 'Custom Time':

"Gmail Custom Time lets users send emails with a custom date in the past, putting it in the recipients inbox at the old date:

How do I use it?

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.

Is there a limit to how far back I can send email?

Yes. You’ll only be able to send email back until April 1, 2004, the day we launched Gmail. If we were to let you send an email from Gmail before Gmail existed, well, that would be like hanging out with your parents before you were born — crazy talk."

There's a full list of Google pranks here.

Techcrunch also very kindly put up links to more Google April Fool's craziness from yesteryear:

• 2007
• 2006

YouTube sabotaged it's own site by 'Rick-Rolling' its users:

"If you aren’t familiar with RickRolling - it’s when someone puts a link on website to something, but it actually takes you to a music video of Rick Astley’s “hit” song Never Gonna Give You Up.

YouTube is RickRolling its own users on April 1. All of the featured videos for YouTube UK and YouTube Australia actually link to the Rick Astley video."


The BBC posted a promotional video on its iPlayer claiming to have discovered flying penguins. The Telegraph printed a story on it in today's paper:

The BBC will today screen remarkable footage of penguins flying as part of its new natural history series, Miracles of Evolution.

Camera crews discovered a colony of Adélie penguins while filming on King George Island, some 750 miles south of the Falkland Islands. The programme is being presented by ex-Monty Python star Terry Jones, who said: "We'd been watching the penguins and filming them for days, without a hint of what was to come. "But then the weather took a turn for the worse. It was quite amazing. Rather than getting together in a huddle to protect themselves from the cold, they did something quite unexpected, that no other penguins can do." BBC1 viewers will see the penguins not only take flight from the Antarctic wastes, but fly thousands of miles to the Amazonian rainforest to find winter sun. "The film reveals nature's stunning glory in exciting and unexpected ways, so much so that it defies belief," said Mr Jones. "Not only does it create a vivid and emotional experience for the viewer, it also illustrates just how bold and simple Darwin's idea of natural selection was."

Tim Ferriss, author of the 4-Hour Work Week, wrote a prank post on his blog, claiming that he had outsourced his life:

"Happy Japanese April Fool’s Day!

Man, oh, man. I was going to wait until tomorrow to publish this follow-up to the last post, but it kicked up some dust, so I wanted to own up. Yessir, it’s an April Fool’s Day joke. Sorry for any confusion! It would have been too obvious on April 1st in the US, so I used the alternate time zone."


There was also an alleged prank from Facebook, claiming a new application allows users to track their friend's on their mobile phones - or maybe it is actually happening?! (via Lewis PR's blog):

It's 1984 in 2008! Big Brother Britain gone mad!

The Times reported today on a shocking new Facebook app that lets you track down your friends through their mobile phones.

The application is called SNIFF (Social Network Integrated Friend Finder) and is, apparently, already popular in Scandinavia.

SNIFFing?! I sniff a rat! It is April 1 after all...


Infoworld magazine posted a whole lot of fake articles on their website. The full list is available here but the highlights are below:

Gotcha! ... Or did we? From the plausible to the absurd, we give you a fool's paradise of April 1 tech fun and insights.


Microsoft, Yahoo agree on buyout price
Redmond nabs Yahoo's datacenters, Web properties, and ad platform for $47.2 billion



Steve Jobs "miracle" in the valley
Thousands of worshipers flock to view "holy site" of Apple founder in Los Altos garage



Google buys Facebook
Two Web powerhouses unit in $25 billion deal



Study: Don't Know tops IT's to-do list
Nascent technology poised to take hold of enterprise, as CIOs gear up to champion Don't Know as an agent of change



Google to acquire U.S. government: What this means for IT
President Bush and CEO Schmidt outline the benefits of the takeover to citizens and shareholders


There's undoubtedly loads more out April Fool's Day pranks out there that aren't listed here.

Which ones have you found or even had played on you?