Once again the computer world is subject to a series of April Fools jokes, many of which I feel are cruel and obnoxious. Time for my annual round-up of what’s just plain stupid out there, and a reminder of why I dislike this type of practical joke.
YouTube isn’t being nasty, but they’re claiming that the new text mode for viewing videos will save on bandwidth.
Google renamed itself Topeka, which is a take-off on various cities around the US renaming themselves Google to get attention (and potential Google jobs).
There is also a 3D icon on the Google Street View app, though I’m not sure if it really works when wearing 3D glasses:
Hulu has “leaked” a secret internal training video.
ThinkGeek has a cool iCade dock for the iPad that’s worth a laugh.
That’s about all I could hunt down on a cursory search. I’m sure there might have been some nasty, misleading April Fools jokes. I really don’t like those, as has been attested in previous blog posts:
We had some, erm, interesting ones here in Australia… a real estate website was touting it’s new “Pets” feature here: http://www.domain.com.au/pets (I thought this one was kind of cute)
A TV blog here also did a joke post about a journalist that started off quite sensible but then became completely ridiculous… it was quite funny and it was rather well done.
Comment by Douglas — April 2, 2010 @ 1:13 am
I did something this year – A classic (meaning overused meme) rickroll. I temporarily replaced my index.html file with a rickroll and tricked a few people into believing that I had the first ever build of Windows Chicago, which is 34.
Comment by linuxlove — April 2, 2010 @ 6:39 am
Ah, the rickroll. I remember the first one I had. I was honestly confused about it and watched the whole freakin’ video. I forget how I learned about it.
Comment by admin — April 2, 2010 @ 7:00 pm