Best Online April Fool’s Pranks 2011

I never thought April Fool’s Day was all that fun until websites started coming up with pranks just for the day. Here are the ones I’ve found so far today!

1. Comic Sans for Everyone – “Google Chrome announced a new extension designed to “improve user experience”. Rigorous testing revealed that one font consistently outperformed all others when it comes to user satisfaction, level of engagement, understanding web content, productivity, click-through rates and conversion rates: Comic Sans.” Even though I knew it was a prank, I assumed that the Install button wouldn’t actually do anything. I was wrong. After clicking the button to install the extension and refreshing the page, my computer’s default font permanently changed to Comic Sans. Check out this screenshot of my About page- ha!

2. Google Motion for Gmail - ”Gmail Motion uses your computer’s built-in webcam and Google’s patented spatial tracking technology to detect your movements and translate them into meaningful characters and commands. Movements are designed to be simple and intuitive for people of all skill levels.”

3. YouTube 1911 – Look at the bottom right corner of videos on YouTube today and you’ll see a 1911 button. Click it, and your video changes to sepia tones and old time music plays over the video. I found a clip from Grey’s Anatomy that worked really well with the 1911 treatment; it’s Meredith visiting Derek in jail and telling him she’s leaving him there and going to Owen and Cristina’s wedding herself. I also giggled at this Top 5 Viral Pictures of 1911 video – flugelhorn feline, ha!

4. Angry Nerds – Game developer Atlassian has been hard at work taking what Roxio started with Angry Birds and making it even better. The story line is “one for the ages – a team of software developers, armed with wit and wile, fighting against an evil hoard of bugs. It’s all drama and suspense. Romeo and Juliet, Lord of the Rings, Zero Wing. But don’t focus on the story. Focus on the physics engine. Because that, my friends, is where the magic happens. What our friends at Rovio started, we perfected. These nerds don’t just fly across the screen – they drop out of the sky like Newton’s apple. Engineering has been working on this for months, tweaking the X to get more Y, reducing the Y to get less X. What you see belongs not on an iPhone or a Droid – it belongs in the Smithsonian.”

5. The Huffington Post – You might have heard that The New York Times is requiring a subscription to NYTimes.com (which also includes the smartphone app) to view more than 20 articles a month. The Huffington Post announced today that employees of The New York Times will now have to pay for a digital subscription in order to view articles with words “over six letters”.

On HuffingtonPost.com you can view the first 6 letters of each word at no charge (including slideshows of adorable kittens). After 6 letters, we will ask you to become a digital subscriber. You may choose to subscribe to see the rest of each word individually, or choose a package to access all words of more than 6 letters. This is an example of what you will see:

“Today the Obama admini-[click here to continue word for a small fee] said that the interv- [click here to continue word for a small fee] in Libya would contin-[click here to continue word for a small fee] indefi [click here to continue word for a small fee]…”

If you find any good ones, leave the link in a comment!