The internet has made loads of things so much cooler. Sitting in front of a computer all day and all night, for example! Web marketing has unlocked the door to business success for many … the web in general has unlocked the door to much frivolity and humour. Not to mention the fact that a good prank can get you a lot of traffic, a lot of links, and a lot of SEO juice in general! Today we check out some of the best April Fool’s pranks on the web in recent times.

SEO

The internet ... letting us think outside the square for April Fool's Day!

Youtube videos flipped

The Ebutouy prank was pretty cool … when you clicked on a Featured Video from the Youtube home page, the layout of the screen remained the same, but every element was flipped upside down. Would this have been possible to do in school? Nope!

Wikipedia – Every editor fakes it

Wikipedia put up an entirely fake home page for April Fools, including stories about NASA monitoring diamonds falling from the sky, the Irish Prmie Minister streaking in public, and ‘The Museum of Bad Art’ in Boston.

Pi Devalued

Spread by email rather than the internet, this hilarious 1998 April Fools prank comes courtesy of the New Mexicans for Science and Reason newsletter (affiliated with the current New England Skeptical Society?), which published an article stating that the Alabama State legislature had voted to change the value of Pi to the ‘biblical’ number of 3.0.

Hotels.com on the moon

Hotels.com once put out an April Fool’s press release telling people that they could book the first rooms on the moon. Price not including travel, of course. Speaking of the moon, in 2004 Google published fictitious job opportunities on their lunar base, Lunax.

Gmail Paper

Google got a bit more crafty in 2007 … many ofhteir early April Fool’s pranks were pretty easily identifiable, after all. This year they brought out the ‘Gmail Paper’ hoax, which was supposed to be a free service whereby your chosen messages were printed out at Google, on 96% post-consumer organic soybean sputum (:-D), and mailed to you via normal post. The service was going to be supported by big red ads on the backs of your messages.

Dishonorable mention: The Conficker virus which was supposed to ‘go off’, destroying the web with a giant botnet, last April Fool’s Day. It was a fizzer … luckily.