No fooling
There are two problems with April fool’s day on the Web.
Firstly, there’s the curiously timeless nature of online publishing. Google has a habit of preserving everything we write in amber so that long after a joke has been published in the context of April 1st, it resurfaces in search results where it may the taken at face value.
Secondly, it becomes very difficult to separate “real” stories from the japes. Remember a few years back when Google launched their GMail service? Remember what day they launched it on? I recall quite a few people who refused to believe the veracity of the announcement.
With that in mind, here are some tidbits that are most definitely pranks:
- GMail adds time-travel support using an e-flux capacitor to resolve issues of causality.
- John Resig releases Class Query for developers who are sick and tired of brevity and simplicity. This one is only funny if you a total code nerd but if you are a total code nerd, it’s very funny indeed.
- The Web Standards Project follow up their bookmark campaign with hyper-localised social tagging.
- Moo announce the MightyCard.
- The latest World of Warcraft character is the bard with damage effects like “epic solo” and “shoegazer”.
- The BBC show flying penguins.
- And finally, every single featured video on YouTube is a winner today.
These bits of news, on the other hand, are for real:
- Joe launches Captioning Sucks in an attempt to bring sanity and standards to the worlds of film and television. Any garishness you may experience is intentional.
- The good people over at Flickr have resurrected Game Neverending—the game that many years ago served as the genesis for Flickr itself (that’s why you’ll still the
.gneextension to this day). The message announcing the resurrection is, of course, very much a joke.
There was one other announcement from Flickr but they managed to get it out right before the dreaded day of foolishness. The site now has a flawless import feature that has completely scrapped the password anti-pattern. Instead they’re using authentication APIs from GMail, Hotmail and Yahoo Mail (that last one is actually a bit of a cheat as Yahoo do not offer any export API for external services).
Needless to say, I’m over the moon about this (although Lachlan is less pleased). First Dopplr, now Flickr. And I’m ashamed to say that I didn’t even put Flickr in the running in the race to do the right thing. Consider me suitably chastised.