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!

Happy April Fool’s Day!

No pranks from me today, I’m not that good at fooling people. Instead, I’m going to keep my eyes out for online pranks and post them here as I find them.

1. On YouTube, clicking on one of the front page videos takes you to an announcement about their new Text-Only” Mode, or “TEXTP”.  The description says

TEXTp is the result of months of intense transcoding efforts by our engineers, who toiled for weeks to ensure that a large chunk of videos on the platform could be reduced to their most basic elements. By replacing the images in the video with a series of letters and numbers, the videos are far less taxing on our system — and have the added benefit of promoting literacy!

HAHAHAHAHA!!! You’ve got to see this video they call “Lego Matrix: Trinity, Help” – there’s nothing pranky about it, it’s just awesome-

2. Google is well-known for their April Fool’s Day pranks, and they’ve got  good ones today. First, Google Search has been renamed, so instead of offering to Google something, you can offer to “Topeka” it:

Their U.K. site announced a new Android App called “Translate for Animals“, which made me bust out laughing, and on the Google Voice page, they announced “Standard Voicemail Mode”  (“Nothing soothes the soul like going through six steps to access my voicemail.”) ha!

3. Funny or Die has renamed themselves “Bieber or Die” today, including today’s “Featured Biebs”.  One announcement says that Justin Bieber has decided to buy Funny or Die and “do with it whatever his tiny little heart desires.” ha!!

4. Trip Advisor announced that Space Travel is now open to the public, including Rants and Raves about trips to the moon. An obvious prank but still funny!

5.  And this one from PostRank announces their new “DoucheRank” service.

The proprietary algorithms analyze myriad data points and normalize publishers’ social networking efforts against their relentless thirst for attention and accolades, resulting in a comprehensive score that definitely answers that age-old quandary: “Am I a douche?”

Number one on their list is JohnMayer.com with 31895908 douche points – *snort*

Click the related links at the end of this post for more pranks, and check the #AprilFools hashtag on Twitter, people are finding lots of good ones. Have you found any you want to share? Leave the link in the comment!

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