April Fools List 2011
If you looked at the calendar, you probably noticed it is April Fools today. Of course, this means that your friends will tell you your fly is open and shoelace is loose, but it is also the day companies will launch new fake products and services.
Linkedin
The people who use LinkedIn are probably familiar with the ‘People you might know’ block in the sidebar. Today it showed people who everyone knows, like Albert Einstein and Dr. Watson.
YouTube
Youtube is known for their April Fools jokes. Couple of years ago they rickrolled everyone and last years they added the ASCII. This year they added the option to view the vintage 1911 version of a video by adding &vintage=1911 to the video. (There are some other years working; try 1987,1997 and 2005)
XKCD
The webcomic tried to give its readers a headache with an 3D effect.
Toshiba
Another company experimenting with 3D was Toshiba. The announced the world’s first 3D monocle. They said you’ll experience one-eyed 3D so real, you’d think you were using both eyes!
Kodak
Kodak announced an app that automatically removes exes from photos named Relationshiffft
Qualcomm
Qualcomm makes processors for smartphones, tablets and other electronics. Their platform is called Snapdragon and in order to let their engineers feel the power of the dragon, they send them on a “Way of the Dragon retreat”
Thinkgeek
The seller of geeky products adds new fake products to their every year. This year they added these nice Star Wars Lightsaber Popsicles. However they are fake now, there are some products in their shop that originally started as April Fools product, that later got added as real product.
WolframAlpha
The computational search engine decided to move to beta today and with it their changed their name and logo to BieberBeta.
Google
Google had a couple of jokes. They introduced Gmail Motion today, which allows you to control Gmail with your body.
Google is also looking for new employees for the job of autocompleter.
It was not the day to use the search engine to look for information about Helvetica. The search for the most loved by designers font would give the results in the most hated font: Comic Sans.
The Google Voice Search team decided it was time for a new language for their app on Android. They added pig latin. It is really simple, for each English word, the first consonant (or consonant cluster) is moved to the end of the word and an “ay” is affixed (for example, “pig” yields “ig-pay” and “search” yields “earch-say”). In the video is shown how to configure it on your Android phone.
I probably missed a few, so feel free to add some more April Fools in the comment section.
