Well, yesterday was that day of the year again. The day when you take every news report with a pinch of salt, when you double or even triple check your sources, family members become pregnant and the restaurant next to your office decides to give away free cake. (The cake is a lie – more Portal references later.)

That’s right, April Fool’s Day was yesterday and the usual element of trust held between friends and co-workers was thrown out of the window. No-one was trusted, no-one was safe.

Anyway, the day is over and everyone survived! What we have left now is our favourite April Fool’s jokes from around the web. Here’s some of my favourites:

If you visited YouTube, you may have noticed that featured videos on the homepage were being linked to a flipped version of the page. Images, text and yes, even the video itself. Very cool.

What’s even more fun about this, is that you can still apply the flipped version to any YouTube video, simply add &flip=1 to the end of the URL. The effect works especially nice with videos of something that was upside down in the first place.

Any chance you were on Google Street View yesterday? If you work in an office, then of course you were. Did you notice your little panda tour guide? (Her name is CADIE, say hello.)



One of my favourites yesterday came from the rivalry between Digg and Reddit. Reddit, the 2nd most popular social media news site, copied the layout and colour scheme from Digg, the 1st most popular social media news site.

The Guardian sees the potential in Twitter, by killing off their print publications and posting their news on Twitter instead.

One of the most interesting April Fool’s case studies comes from thinkgeek.com, who post several fake products every year on April 1st. The products, presentation and execution are always very well thought out. It’s clear that they put a lot of effort in for this day. But why bother? Why waste those man hours on something as frivolous as an April Fool’s joke, just for one day? I don’t have any stats to back this up, but I’m willing to bet that April 1st is one of their busiest days (outside of the Christmas period, of course.) April 1st traffic is a market in itself. Infact, traffic on this day is so large that the demand for one of their fake products from 2007 actually made it into the assembly line.

My favourite fake products from them this year are the Squeez Bacon® (mmm) and the Portal t-shirts (<3 my companion cube!)

The point is, thinkgeek.com found a market in fake products and have capitalised on it. Any audience you can attract can be converted into customers, with the right strategy.

To further back up this point, Smashing Magazine's April Fool's article has (so far) received over 300 replies, making it one of their most popular this year.