Tech tomfoolery: April Fool's Day on the Web

By Rich Trenholm on 01 April 2009, 2:33pm

It was japes a-plenty this morning as the annual beano of bullcrap that is April Fool's Day swept the Internet. Technology played a big part, with Twitter especially in the fooling firing line. Even the national newspapers had their fingers on the pulse with a host of tech-related thigh-slappers.

The Daily Express gave us the speed camera-cheating, clingfilm-wrapped invisible car, while the Telegraph went with the energy-generating properties of fish swimming upstream. Best of all, the Guardian announced that the newspaper would soon become the Twardian.

It wasn't just the newspapers getting in on the tech tomfoolery. Amazon put the cloud in cloud computing with FACE. Google meanwhile went nuts, mastering brain search with CADIE, a panda-obsessed artificial intelligence. Google China excelled itself with CADIE-aided pigeon view.

With the econopocalypse in full swing, mergers and acquisitions were in the spotlight. TorrentFreak reported that Warner Brothers had snapped up the Pirate Bay. Identi.ca turned into a literal Twitter clone after buying up the more famous site.

A passel of pranksome products also debuted today, beginning with Wired's coverage of the Twitter TW-900. The Lirpa 100-F is available on pay as you go, while the BBC has brought iPlayer to a toaster and Xbox is yodelling about Alpine Legend.

Not all the day's japes hit the mark. YouTube failed to turn your frown upside-down with inverted-themed videos on its homepage, which frankly isn't a patch on last year's mass rickroll. Here at Crave we didn't bother with an April Fool's joke, despite some commenters claiming that our exclusive story on Sony starting a a format war with itself had to be a hoax. Even PR companies got in on the capers with spoof press releases like the chucklesome sat-nav shoes.

Finally, it turns out that the Ikea Leko concept car wasn't an elaborate build-up to some four-wheeled flat-pack foolery. Shame.