April Fool's Jokes 2007

Posted on April 1, 2007

It is difficult to take much news seriously today with all the fakes and jokes being published. April Fool's seems to take on a special meaning in the tech world. As TechCrunch explains Google takes April Fool's Day very seriously and always comes up with something. Here a few April Fool's highlights for 2007:

Google's Gmail Paper gag would have your printed emails arriving by the truckload. "You can make us print one, one thousand, or one hundred thousand of your emails. It's whatever seems reasonable to you." The printing and postage costs will be offset with huge ads: "The cost of postage is offset with the help of relevant, targeted, unobtrusive advertisements, which will appear on the back of your Gmail Paper prints in red, bold, 36 pt Helvetica." Google also has launched TISP, a free in-home wireless broadband service from your toilet. TISP stands for Toilet Internet Service Provider.
For gamers, ThinkGeek is offering the WiiHelm where you move your head around instead of the wiimote. ThinkGeek says, "The WiiHelm works great with all of your favorite Wii games and the included foot pedal allows easy button presses using minimal toe effort. Plus the amazing Wiimote Saf-T-Lok technology and double reinforced head strap save you thousands of dollars in damaged flat-screen repair charges."
LivePoke: Facebook had a series of fake news feeds. One read, "Introducing LivePoke! Facebook will dispatch a real live person today to poke a friend of your choice."
Starbucks on Twittervision. A giant Starbucks logo appeared on Twittervision early this morning. It's gone already so if you didn't see it you've missed it.
The Matt Cutts blog was hacked prank: "The Dark SEO Team has had a bit of a beef with Google's Matt Cutts from back in 2005 over URL hijacking. Looks like they've pulled a prank on him today. Matt's blog is down, hacked -- and archives wiped out as well."