So April Fools’ is finally over and we’ve been left here with a bunch of pranks, fake news and weird software apps to be added to our personal collection. It seems that April Fools’ jokes are becoming more and more sophisticated each year: now it’s not a question of coming up with the most absurd idea to make people laugh; it’s trying to make those people actually believe that what you’re talking about is true.
During the past few years, Google has made it clear that they’re the absolute April Fools’ kings. Since they also used this date (April 1st) to launch Gmail for real, sometimes it’s hard to know whether they’re launching another new service or simply trying to fool us.
Yesterday we could see several examples of their creativity and sense of humor: the gDay (a new feature enabling you to search Internet content before it’s created), the Wakeup Kit (a new service in Google Calendar to make sure you get out of bed) and Virgle (a Virgin & Google project to set the first permanent human colony on Mars) were some of the Google pranks, together with some smaller details like the possibility to create a paper airplane in Google Docs or set an appointment with famous people in Google Calendar.
But Google is not the only one that tried to get us to smile yesterday. Youtube, for example, linked every single featured video on its homepage to Rick Astley’s hit Never Gonna Give You Up. Meanwhile, Aviary surprised us with a revolutionary web-based time machine that could take any photo and create its future – or past – version. The accompanying screenshots were just hilarious.
Pranks were not limited to software: videogames also contributed to the fun by providing us with great headlines like this: WoWinsider decides to give up on Blizzard’s MMORPG and focus on the much more exciting Hello Kitty Online. Talking about WoW, we also learned that this popular game was finally coming to consoles… but starting with the Atari 2600 platform at a “glorious 192i resolution”. Thinkgeek, the popular geek online shop, also contributed to the gaming April Fools’ with the awesome Super Pii Pii Brothers game for the Wii, as well as other remarkable objects such as the Personal Soundtrack T-Shirt or the USB Pregnancy Test.
Finally, we hope you liked our contribution to this year’s April Fools’. We had loads of fun while creating Satellite Live and hope you didn’t take the joke too badly!
