April Fools’ is a time-honored tradition in Silicon Valley. One blog tells of pranks like a VW Beetle, its engine running, in an exec’s office, like a ship in a bottle; or moving another’s office into a tank at San Francisco’s Steinhart Aquarium. In recent decades, April Fools’ Day in the tech world has become about spreading online jokes with internet speed sometimes even early for better publicity, but still, some are better than others.
This year TechCrunch’s joke alleged that Google had bought a company to enable it to design and build small mobile nuclear reactors. A Google spokesman told the L.A. Times Tech blog, “We appreciate TechCrunch’s early April Fools’ story but have no comment at this time other than to say that this has nothing to do with our exploration of marshmallows as an alternative energy source. They work for kids; why not for data centers too?”
Google probably has such a good sense of humor because it likes to indulge in pranks, too. Last year Google posted 12 pranks. This year, they announced that in response to the city of Topeka, Kansas changing its name to Google, KS, “Google has officially changed our name to Topeka.”
Google UK announced an app for Android phones called Translate for Animals, complete with a tour and a clever, funny YouTube video.
Best of all, ThinkGeek.com has some joke products that I wish were real. Here’s a list of some of the items from their April 1st homepage. Clicking to buy any of them takes you to a page saying “Gotcha!”
• iCade iPad Arcade Cabinet
• USB PC Tanner - Your Desktop Fun-without-the-sun Buddy
• moodINQ programmable Tattoo system –subdermal designs that can change on a whim. Indecisiveness never looked so good.
Tags: Internet Speed