April Fool’s Day: The Most Annoying Day in Tech

Odds are that any additional articles I write today will be site reviews, because today is my least favorite day of the year as a tech blogger. Beyond my usual schedule of getting Rick rolled at least once a day by someone, I am now stuck with sifting through my feeds trying to determine what's actual news and what's an April Fool's Day prank.

Of course, since this has become a tech blogosophere tradition, many blogs are determined to get out of the gate first, starting their prank articles on the 31st, which is far worse than breaking embargo, because it adds an additional 24 hours to the tomfoolery. TechCrunch led off with Michael Arrington's $25 million lawsuit, while CNET insists that TechCrunch has bought and is building out a site to brainwash pre-teen girls. Center Networks has a video of Robert Scoble's newest venture: Ice Cream Library TV, a send-up of Gary Vaynerchuk's Wine Libary TV.

Google is spreading their usual April Fool's love in a global way, starting with Australia, whose April Fool's Day starts well before ours in the U.S. The Aussies were the recipients of gDay with MATE, a future search feature that really would make today a lot easier on me. Today in the U.S., we're getting Gmail Custom Time, ensuring that you'll never be late or miss that important birthday email to grandma again, as well as Project Virgle, a joint project between Google and Virgin's resident loon Richard Branson to establish a colony on Mars. There's no sign of the animated character prank that Google Blogoscoped spoiled last month, but I'll be keeping an eye out in Google Docs just to make sure. TechCrunch notes that Google Docs does include the ability to create a new paper airplane, and is sponsoring a contest if you print it, build it, and fly it, posting the video online.

ThinkGeek is advertising the ultimate techie toy today: Wii Sports for the iPhone. The sad part is that I'd be more people would buy that than I care to think about. They are also offering a USB pregnancy test, and my personal favorite, a taser that automatically records the tasering for immediate posting on YouTube. Of course, even if I did get that video of a tasering, it wouldn't really matter, since YouTube is Rick rolling everyone; every link to a featured video on its front page takes you to Rick Astley.

SheGeeks points to a new competitor for FriendFeed called PleaseDon'tBeMyFriend, a de-aggregator service that promises to protect the sanctity of your feeds, preventing aggregators from aggregating for the low price of $20 a month. Revision3 has announced an initiative to “give back to science and stuff.”

The folks over at Amazon Web Services got into the act with their Dog-Computer Interface (DCI), putting an adorable dog to work on the Mechanical Turk issues. Think Gene notes that scientists have successfully created the first Man-Bear-Pig, which should keep Al Gore too busy for the foreseeable future. Infoworld has the exclusive with details of Apple's Leopard follow-up, Mac OS XI, an iTunes-based operating system. And Leslie alerts me to one that I fell for early yesterday, PayPerTweet.

ReadWriteWeb has an exclusive today as well, the discovery of Google's planned DreamAds, which will conduct passive advertising while you sleep. Mashable's news includes an announcement of Chris Pirillo's retirement from live video streaming.

Infoworld did it better than most; since the headline is what shows up on Techmeme, they actually got a second look out of me with their claims that Yahoo agreed to a Microsoft buyout, confirmed last night at midnight. If you don't look at the URL, it's actually the most believable April Fool's joke article yet today, so props to them.

Allen Stern at Center Networks notes that Google Calendar also got in on the action today; if you create a new event, you have the option of entering your own data or clicking “I feel lucky” which adds an event for you. Sorry, Google, but I'm not interested in a date with crazy. I already have kids, thank you.

Woot is having a Woot-off today, but all the items are the same. I think. The blog shows that at least one of their legenday “Bags of Crap” where you pay $1.00 plus shipping to get anything from random office supplies to a big-screen television has appeared.

The Museum of Modern Betas alerts us to one more Google service for the day: Google Wake-up Kit.

There are always a few latecomers to every party; Xobni announces support for PINE (and has set off a string of bad flashbacks of the days when I used PINE for email and vi for building web sites). And Damien Katz claims CouchDB is being ported from Erlang to Java. blip.tv didn't want to be left behind today, and announced support for a Rick Roll advertising model. Finally (I hope), Google Blogoscoped breaks all the Google pranks down for us , including Google Japan, and Google Talk pranks I missed.

I knew it was too good to be true. There were two others I forgot to mention. CafePress announced the Love Match Dating Service, while Drama 2.0 came in with a weak entry pretending he was closing down his blog as the result of illegal activities. Are we done now? 

I'll be sure to update throughout the day just in case I'm not the only one who struggles with what's real and what's not today. Unfortunately, however, Shine isn't a Yahoo prank.