April fools chaos
April 1st must be the craziest day of the year. You can’t get any more serious stories anywhere on the web, you have to filter tons of fake news, and when you finally find one that’s not a prank, you begin wondering if it’s really genuine.
Here’s a list of the April fools day pranks I encountered today:
- Mozilla buys IE (this is probably the worst of them all)
- Yahoo buys Digg and Web 2.0 (how can someone buy Web 2.0?!)
- Microsoft buys OpenOffice.org
- Microsoft to release Vista with a Linux kernel
- Scoble moves to Google
- Spoofed MSN Search results
- NewEgg to buy Dell
- Google showing aliens and UFOs on Google Maps
- Google Rooms showing Larry Page’s room
- Bill G. referring the IE team to Opera
- GameFAQ shutting down
- Pink Slashdot (I didn’t think they could make it any uglier)
- Duke Nukem released
- Leaked Windows Vista screenshot looking like Windows 2.0
- Bill Maher announcing he will stop smoking cannabis
- Ask.com making rhymes with search results
- Live.com search textbox running away from cursor
Some of them are good pranks, but 70% of the stories I’ve seen today are (too) obvious April fools jokes.
Next year, I’ll take the red pill, and stay away from any source of news.