It appears as if today is not going to be a slow news day. Already it’s been reported that The Guardian has taken its newspaper out of print and onto Twitter, dangerous hummingbirds have been spotted in rural Gloucestershire (by Dr Julius Doctor) and Warner Bros have acquired the Pirate Bay. It’s April 1st and in keeping with tradition, the Internets are awash with April Fools’ day jokes.
Not only are spoof news stories spreading virally today, websites are messing with us too. YouTube have turned their videos upside down, Reddit have redesigned their homepage to resemble Digg and Google have introduced a new Gmail feature which allows you to auto respond to those attractive and strangely frequent business propositions from Nigerian princes, princesses and kings.
Google have always been keen April Fools tricksters. Last year they launched a search feature called gDay that allowed users to search into the future. They also announced a partnership with Virign called Virgle, a joint venture to go to Mars.
Big April Fools pranks have been going on for many years. The BBC pulled a spectacular April Fools stunt in 1957 when they managed to fool a large amount of the British public with a 3 minute Panorama documentary about Swiss farmers harvesting spaghetti from spaghetti trees. The documentary was followed by numerous phonecalls from the gullible public enquiring where they could get their own spaghetti bush.
To keep up to date with the 2009 april fools jokes, you can see a comprehensive list at April Fools’ Day on the Web.
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