BUZZ NEWS

April Fools’: Best Of The Net

Posted on April 2, 2009
Nicolas Mirguet

This year, the Internet follows tradition and does not disappoint. Here is the roundup of the best online pranks of April Fools’ 2009...

YouTube makes us topsy-turvy by flipping its site upside down once the video player is launched on the home page. A somewhat simple prank, but nonetheless makes itself noticed:

Opera, one of Internet Explorer’s direct competitors, did not lack any creativity with their April Fools’ prank as they introduced a revolutionary new application that enables Web surfing by reading facial gestures. The application is aptly named "Face Gestures", and is demonstrated below:

Google and its affiliates went all out with a number of rather interesting April Fools’ shenanigans. The one that caught our attention the most is the Gmail Autopilot, which allows the user to respond to emails without reading them. The proof is in the image below!

Pirate Bay, the notorious illegal Torrent download tracker, currently involved in legal suits with major American production and distribution companies, chose to attempt to trick us into believing they now have a partnership with Warner Bros:

Wired, the famous American technology oriented magazine, has chosen to tackle something very popular at the moment as their prank, by claiming in a video that "Twitter Plans to Make Money", poking fun at Twitter’s seeming lack of a business plan.

CB Newsletter has hit us with some news this morning: Sustainable development week is now sponsored by Hummer (yes, the SUV company). This news has been a little hard to swallow for some...

French clothing company Petit Bateau celebrated this childish and fun holiday (which they frequently have in the past) by creating a module on its site to create your own April Fools’ Day T-shirts.

Finally, no huge buzz campaigns, besides for Ikea’s carpooling service. Wait...it’s not an April Fools’?!

One more prank, hot off the wire, and this may be the best one yet. The SNCF (French National Railway) clearly wants to change its image, as it has been using the voice of popular cartoon character Homer Simpson to announce incoming and outgoing trains in Parisian train stations. This may sound too good to be true, but the video below proves it:

Indeed, in response to a 140,000 member strong Facebook group created recently demanding that the SNCF replace their regular announcement voice with that of Homer Simpson on April 1, the SNCF played along! You can hear Homer announcing such hilarious phrases as: "The train arriving from Alaska is expected on track 6. Look out for bears", or "Please sir, remove your fingers from your nose, I can see everything from up here", or even "I am the master of the world, I am speaking in the train station’s microphone!" Now isn’t that incredible? It definitely proves that Facebook groups created for fun can be taken seriously!