Top Ten April Fools Day Jokes of 2010

It’s first of April and that can mean only one thing – April Fools Day! Coming up with a good prank is not easy, especially when everyone is expecting it. It requires creativity and a touch of brilliance. Here are my favourite pranks from around the interweb.

10. Wikipedia – Why Divorce When You Can Trade Your Wife

Wikipedia retained its tradition of crafting fake news to mark this day. This time around, the featured article is wife-selling.

9. Uncylopedia – Suck it Fellows! No Gag for You

The first thing I did after checking Wikipedia’s gag was to head over to the Uncylopedia. This is what I was greeted with:

You must have expected some outlandish April Fool’s gag. You probably thought we’ll mimic some not-as-amusing wiki or claim that we have been shut down due to various legal offences. You might even go as far as to speculate that the whole content you see on this site has been modified to become true, accurate and encyclopedic

Uncyclopedia’s April Fool’s day gag is that there isn’t one. Yet, in their very own way, they have managed to mock most other April Fool’s day pranks.

8. YouTube – Text is In, Video is Out

YouTube is offering a special text mode, which they claim, will help them save $1 a second in bandwidth costs. Any ad-free video can be converted into text mode by appending the string ‘&textp=fool’ to the URL. Head over to G4TV for some really cool sample ASCII arts generated by the text mode.

7. Opera – Forget about Earth, Let’s Conquer Space

Last year, Opera was at #1 courtesy of its ingenious Facial Gestures prank. This time around, they have prepared not one but two entries. First off, Opera Software has announced their secret Future Opera Operations in Lunar Surroundings (i.e. FOOLS) program, which will ensure Opera’s supremacy in the next frontier – Space.

On a slightly geekier note, Opera Developer network announced a new 1-dimensional HTML5 canvas element. Why do we need it?
In Opera’s own words:

While this (3D graphics) is the focus of attention for most software and hardware companies, we feel an important area of technical development has been neglected: 1D.
Opera, known for its innovation, has raced ahead of the competition yet again by proposing the addition of a one-dimensional context to HTML5’s canvas element.

6. College Humor – You Are Screwed

College Humor is abandoning all niceties and trying to evoke the fear of the Big Brother. All visitors to the site were greeted with a stark looking message stating, “Your IP address: x.x.x.x has been logged by United States Department of Information under the Civilian Surveillance Act “. College Humor’s prank is simple but probably managed to scare the living daylights out of several visitors.

5. CrunchPad – Tablets for Everyone

The best April Fool’s day jokes are the most believable ones. And, this is one joke that I almost fell for. In a perfectly innocuous looking post, Michael Arrington announced that TechCrunch will be manufacturing a do it yourself it with which anyone can build his very own tablet PC.

4. Google – All Roads Lead to Topeka

Remember Topeka Kanas – the little city in USA that had renamed itself to Google? If you don’t, then check out TechCrunch’s report on the bewildering name change. Today, Google paid homage to the city by renaming itself to Topeka. Google also won brownie points for mentioning the Google kid.

3. Reddit – Be King for a Day

Admittedly, I may be slightly biased in favour of reddit. But, who would not love to be king for a day? Today Reddit allowed its devoted users to do just that (well…kind of). Head over to Reddit.com and turn on the admin mode to be the king of reddit for a day.

2. XKCD – Terminal is Cool

The webcomics for geeks is now geekier than ever in its special new UNIXified avatar. Everyone loves easter eggs and there are plenty of them to be found in xkcd’s UNIX terminal. Have a look at the screenshot below.

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Sorry, were you expecting a #1 on this list?