April Fools 2008 on the Web

Gruber wants to be a spoil sport by linking to Your April Fools Day Joke Continues to Suck. While I admit that the old “I changed my stylesheet to someone else’s” joke isn’t that funny any more, I do enjoy the bit of weird stuff that shows up on April 1. Maybe it’s not laugh out loud funny, but it brings a smile to my face, and I’m sure it does the same for others. So, I say bring it on!

The best joke I’ve seen so far is from Tim Ferriss, author of “The 4-Hour Workweek”. If you’re not familiar with Tim or his book, you probably won’t get the joke. If you are familiar with Tim and “personal outsourcing”, you should check out: The Grand Illusion: The Real Tim Ferriss Speaks

The funniest one that I’ve seen so far is that uk.youtube.com is rickrolling people with all of the Featured Videos.

The annual Google main joke was Virgle, a joint venture between Virgin and Google to colonize Mars. Nice graphics. Not absurd enough to be hysterically funny, but good for a little entertainment.

A better joke from Google comes from Google Australia: gDay MATE technology that lets you search 1 day into the future.

Google Calendar has a Wake Up Kit, but even better… they’ve added an “I’m Feeling Lucky” but to the appointment scheduling dialog. Click it, and you schedule a date with a celebrity!

Also better than the main joke: Gmail Custom Time (choose the time that the message should have been sent). Hmm… search in the future, mail in the past. Cool!

ThinkGeek has the awesome Betamax to HD-DVD Converter among other April 1 products.

Google is credited with releasing GWT for JavaScript 2, which uses the existing GWT widgets and compiles JavaScript 2 to cross-browser JavaScript. This is actually not so far fetched (Olav Junker Kjær has written a JavaScript 2->traditional JS translator), but such a thing is also not likely to get much traction.

Not an April Fools joke, but amazing nonetheless, a BBC commercial about flying migratory penguins with footage that looks straight out of Planet Earth.