April 1st has come and gone once again. This year’s turnout was pretty good, with Google being the most extravagant as usual. For posterity, I thought a roundup of some of the best would be in order.
Google Becomes “Topeka”
Referencing Topeka, Kansas’ changing of their name to “Google, Kansas” for a month, Google changed their name to “Topeka” for April Fools’ Day.
Envato Launches GIFtuts+
Envato, famous for their TUTS+ network of blog, announced their newest site: GIFtuts+. Complete with several horrid animated GIFs, Comic Sans and Papyrus, the announcement links to an actual gif.tutsplus.com domain.
HootSuite Goes 3D
To my knowledge, the joke didn’t go beyond an announcement and a retweet campaign promising “early beta access,” but the idea was pretty good. And bonus points for the Owl logo with 3D glasses.
YouTube Text-Only Mode
It costs a lot of money to run YouTube. Help them save money by using the new text-only mode. YouTube saves $1 per second in bandwidth when you view videos as text.
The Secrets of the Universe by Sheldon Cooper, Ph.D
BookAdvice.net reviews Dr. Sheldon Cooper’s new book. Be sure to click the “REVIEW” link for the full review…
UniXKCD
The popular web comic XKCD changed their homepage to a Unix command line, including many of the expected commands, but with humorous responses. You may still be able to see it here, and the Reddit thread has a cheat sheet of available commands.
Clicky Twitter Updates
You like Foursquare. You like Clicky. Why not combine the two? Exactly what we were thinking! Every time you visit a site with the Clicky tracking code installed, we’ll automatically tweet out from your Twitter account which web site you are viewing. Combined with Foursquare, not only will all your followers know WHERE you are every second of every day, but also what you’re doing on the internet – every second of every day!
Clicky Blog: Check in at your favorite web sites – automatically!
Reddit: Everyone’s an Admin!
Reddit’s elaborate April Fools’ Day event was to throw a bit of chaos into the community…by giving everyone admin privileges! For 24 hours you could actually ban users, vote stories up or down multiple times, edit other users’ headlines, etc.. (I think they kept a separate database of the edits, and used some JavaScript magic to dynamically apply them after the original content loaded.)
World of WarCraft Equipment Potency EquivalencE Number
Blizzard posted a series of fake announcements, including the “Equipment Potency EquivalencE Number,” which tells everyone just how awesome your armor and other gear is.
As part of the upcoming stat-system revamp, we plan to introduce a new tool that will let World of Warcraft players know exactly where they stand in comparison to other players: the Equipment Potency EquivalencE Number. With this new system, you’ll no longer have to wonder about your perceived or actual worth as a player. Your Equipment Potency EquivalencE Number, automatically derived from the quality of the gear you currently possess, will be placed on your character sheet and in the Armory, and also displayed over your character’s head in-game as an easy-to-read bar-like object that steadily grows as you acquire loot.
Google Maps Australia – Aussie Directions
Google Australia updated their Maps service to give more…interesting driving instructions.
MOO: Double sided Business Cards: Reinvented!
MOO.com, famous for their double-sided business cards with a different image on each card, announced their latest offering: double-sided cards with the image on the back instead of the front!
Kodak: Aromatography
Imagine seeing an image of a field of wildflowers and the experiencing all the delicate and complex aromas that accompany the visual experience.
It’s no longer just a dream, thanks to recent breakthroughs in Neuro-Optic-Nasal-Sense Imaging*
GMail: Today’s Vowel Outage
The official GMail blog has been updated with news of a vowel server failure that affected the web front-end of the email service for most of the day.
At 6:01 am Pacific Time, during routine maintenance at one of our datacenters, the frontend web servers in that particular datacenter started failing to render the letter ‘a’ for a subset of users. As error rates escalated, the strain spread to other datacenters. We worked quickly to avoid a cascading failure of the entire alphabet by implementing a stopgap solution that limited the damage to the letters ‘a,’ ‘e,’ ‘i,’ ‘o,’ and ‘u.’ As a result, we’re experiencing Gmail’s first temporary vowel outage. (We’re still investigating whether the letter ‘y’ is impacted and will post an update here shortly.)
Ben and Jerry’s Ice Screen™
Ben and Jerry’s brings you the amazing new “Ice Screen” technology that lets you sample ice cream online by licking your screen.
