April Fools' websites and ads

[RangerJoe]

So, it's April Fool's Day and you know there are companies that have been planning for this day all year! What websites or ads have you found that are an April Fool's joke?

The first one I found, while stumbling, was a blog for new Starbucks sizes.

Starbucks Listens to Customer Request for More Sizes | Starbucks Coffee Company

SEATTLE, April 1, 2010 –Starbucks announced today the introduction of two new beverage sizes in stores in the U. S. and Canada this Fall. The announcement follows a year of research and direct customer feedback through MyStarbucksIdea.com requesting even more choice in beverage size.

“Whether customers are looking for a large or small size, the Plenta and the Micra satisfy all U.S. and Canada customers’ needs for more and less coffee,” said Hugh Mungis, Starbucks VP of Volume. “Our size selection is now plentiful.”

[Hektore]

Official Google Blog: A different kind of company name

Originally Posted by Topeka

Early last month the mayor of Topeka, Kansas stunned the world by announcing that his city was changing its name to Google. We’ve been wondering ever since how best to honor that moving gesture. Today we are pleased to announce that as of 1AM (Central Daylight Time) April 1st, Google has officially changed our name to Topeka.


We didn’t reach this decision lightly; after all, we had a fair amount of brand equity tied up in our old name. But the more we surfed around (the former) Topeka’s municipal website, the more kinship we felt with this fine city at the edge of the Great Plains.

In fact, Topeka Google Mayor Bill Bunten expressed it best: “Don’t be fooled. Even Google recognizes that all roads lead to Kansas, not just yellow brick ones.”

For 150 years, its fortuitous location at the confluence of the Kansas River and the Oregon Trail has made the city formerly known as Topeka a key jumping-off point to the new world of the West, just as for 150 months the company formerly known as Google has been a key jumping-off point to the new world of the web. When in 1858 a crucial bridge built across the Kansas River was destroyed by flooding mere months later, it was promptly rebuilt — and we too are accustomed to releasing 2.0 versions of software after stormy feedback on our ‘beta’ releases. And just as the town's nickname is "Top City," and the word “topeka” itself derives from a term used by the Kansa and Ioway tribes to refer to “a good place to dig for potatoes,” we’d like to think that our website is one of the web's top places to dig for information.

In the early 20th century, the former Topeka enjoyed a remarkable run of political prominence, gracing the nation with Margaret Hill McCarter, the first woman to address a national political convention (1920, Republican); Charles Curtis, the only Native American ever to serve as vice president (’29 to ‘33, under Herbert Hoover); Carrie Nation, leader of the old temperance movement (and wielder of American history’s most famous hatchet); and, most important, Alfred E. Neuman, arguably the most influential figure to an entire generation of Americans. We couldn’t be happier to add our own chapter to this storied history.

A change this dramatic won’t happen without consequences, perhaps even some disruptions. Here are a few of the thorny issues that we hope everyone in the broader Topeka community will bear in mind as we begin one of the most important transitions in our company’s history:

* Correspondence to both our corporate headquarters and offices around the world should now be addressed to Topeka Inc., but otherwise can be addressed normally.
* Google employees once known as “Googlers” should now be referred to as either “Topekers” or “Topekans,” depending on the result of a board meeting that’s ongoing at this hour. Whatever the outcome, the conclusion is clear: we aren’t in Google anymore.
* Our new product names will take some getting used to. For instance, we’ll have to assure users of Topeka News and Topeka Maps that these services will continue to offer news and local information from across the globe. Topeka Talk, similarly, is an instant messaging product, not, say, a folksy midwestern morning show. And Project Virgle, our co-venture with Richard Branson and Virgin to launch the first permanent human colony on Mars, will henceforth be known as Project Vireka.
* We don’t really know what to tell Oliver Google Kai’s parents, except that, if you ask us, Oliver Topeka Kai would be a charming name for their little boy.
* As our lawyers remind us, branded product names can achieve such popularity as to risk losing their trademark status (see cellophane, zippers, trampolines, et al). So we hope all of you will do your best to remember our new name’s proper usage:

Finally, we want to be clear that this initiative is a one-shot deal that will have no bearing on which municipalities are chosen to participate in our experimental ultra-high-speed broadband project, to which Google, Kansas has been just one of many communities to apply.

Posted by Eric Schmidt, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Topeka Inc.

[noodle]

Yeah, Topeka was the first place I went, they always have something good.

[RangerJoe]

Man arrested at Large Hadron Collider claims he's from the future - Crave at CNET UK

A would-be saboteur arrested today at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland made the bizarre claim that he was from the future. Eloi Cole, a strangely dressed young man, said that he had travelled back in time to prevent the LHC from destroying the world.

The LHC successfully collided particles at record force earlier this week, a milestone Mr Cole was attempting to disrupt by stopping supplies of Mountain Dew to the experiment's vending machines. He also claimed responsibility for the infamous baguette sabotage in November last year.

Mr Cole was seized by Swiss police after CERN security guards spotted him rooting around in bins. He explained that he was looking for fuel for his 'time machine power unit', a device that resembled a kitchen blender.

Police said Mr Cole, who was wearing a bow tie and rather too much tweed for his age, would not reveal his country of origin. "Countries do not exist where I am from. The discovery of the Higgs boson led to limitless power, the elimination of poverty and Kit-Kats for everyone. It is a communist chocolate hellhole and I'm here to stop it ever happening."

This isn't the first time time-travel has been blamed for mishaps at the LHC. Last year, the Japanese physicist Masao Ninomiya and Danish string-theory pioneer Holger Bech Nielsen put forward the hypothesis that the Higgs boson was so "abhorrent" that it somehow caused a ripple in time that prevented its own discovery.

Professor Brian Cox, a former CERN physicist and full-time rock'n'roll TV scientist, was sympathetic to Mr Cole. "Bless him, he sounds harmless enough. At least he didn't mention bloody black holes."

Mr Cole was taken to a secure mental health facility in Geneva but later disappeared from his cell. Police are baffled, but not that bothered.

[Redlemon]

Thanks, I was going to start this thread.

There are always good products available at ThinkGeek :: Stuff for Smart Masses . I want the Dharma Initiative Alarm Clock.

YouTube - Dharma Initiative Alarm Clock from ThinkGeek

YouTube - Dharma Initiative Alarm Clock from ThinkGeek

--------------

This one has to be a joke, but I can't figure out how they pulled off the video. Improv Everywhere posted the results of the No Underwear Subway Ride. (I'm on the Agents list, but didn't get notice of this event, so it must be a joke.)

YouTube- Broadcast Yourself.

YouTube- Broadcast Yourself.

[Redlemon]

Official Gmail Blog: Today’s vowel outage

If you logged into Gmail over the last hour (or visited the Gmail homepage), you probably noticed that something looked a bit off: all the vowels are missing. We realize this makes things difficult for all of you who rely on Gmail — whether at home or at work — and we’re incredibly sorry. We take morphological issues like this extremely seriously, so we want to let you all know what happened and what we're doing about it.

At 6:01 am Pacific Time, during routine maintenance at one of our datacenters, the frontend web servers in that particular datacenter started failing to render the letter 'a' for a subset of users. As error rates escalated, the strain spread to other datacenters. We worked quickly to avoid a cascading failure of the entire alphabet by implementing a stopgap solution that limited the damage to the letters 'a,' 'e,' 'i,' 'o,' and 'u.' As a result, we're experiencing Gmail’s first temporary vowel outage. (We’re still investigating whether the letter 'y' is impacted and will post an update here shortly.)

Over the last hour we've received numerous reports of this issue via our help forums, from colleagues at Google, and via email you’ve sent us. Some of you have already found creative workarounds for communicating without vowels, like Aaron, who sent us this:


Having 80.8% of the alphabet available is significantly below the 99.9% full letter uptime reliability we strive for. Since identifying the root case of this issue, we’ve started bringing vowels back to Gmail, so you should see them back in your account within the next few hours if you don’t already. In the meantime, while you may still see this issue in Gmail's web interface, both IMAP and POP access are functioning normally. We'll post an update as soon as things are fully resolved and, again, we're v3ry s0rry.

Update (7:30 am): We’ve determined that the letter 'y' is not impacted.

-----------------

YouTube has some sort of text-only method, I was having trouble triggering it.

[telekinetic]

Reddit has given all logged-in users full administrative privileges.

[Redlemon]

Lifehacker has a post like this one.
Your April Fools' Day Prank Spoiler - Pranks - Lifehacker

[Glory's Sun]

woot has a choose your adventure thing going on today.. kinda awesome

[djtestudo]

My favorite, mostly because it's local.

John Hopkins University

Since its establishment in 1876 as America's first research university, Daniel said, anyone and everyone has stumbled over "Johns Hopkins," omitting the seemingly superfluous "s" altogether or dropping it randomly into the name anywhere but where it belonged.

"It's not just 'John Hopkins,'" Daniel said. "We've heard 'John Hopskins.' We've heard 'John Shopskins.' One flustered high school kid in an admissions interview the other day actually called us 'Bob Hoskins.'"

[Cynthetiq]

Yes, shalashka.

[Xerxys]

[Jetée]

1st Annual No Underwear Subway Ride

YouTube - No Underwear Subway Ride

YouTube - No Underwear Subway Ride

[Craven Morehead]

Should be a hot item especially today.....

BandGeeks Rejoice @ Geeks.com!

[Xerxys]

^^ Isn't that illegal? Not to mention unnerving? I love NYC man!

---------- Post added at 03:03 PM ---------- Previous post was at 02:56 PM ----------

The Letter "Z" Will Be removed from the English Alphabet   click to show 

The Letter “Z” Will Be Removed from the English Alphabet

from Daily Writing Tips by Daniel Scocco100+ people liked this



Surprising as it sounds, it looks like the English alphabet will be losing one of its letters on June 1st. The announcement came from the English Language Central Commission (ELCC).
Here is a quote from the press release:

After carefully considering and debating the matter for over two years, the ELCC came to the conclusion that the letter “Z” should be removed from the English alphabet. The main objective of this change is to simplify the phonetic aspect of the language, and to unify the American and British spellings.

What will happen to the words that have the letter “z” in them? It depends on the word. According to the ELCC, words that started with a “z” will now start with an “x”. Examples include:

• zero becomes xero
• zoo becomes xoo
• zone becomes xone
• zodiac becomes xodiac

Words that featured a “z” with the “s” sound, on the other hand, will now be officially written with the “s” (i.e., unifying the American and British spelling). Examples include:

• visualize becomes visualise
• analyze becomes analyse
• materialize becomes materialise

What do you think about this change? Will it really simplify the English language, or will it make things more confusing?

[Redlemon]

RB: Marching Band? Bring it on!

[snowy]

I just heard a great one on Talk of the Nation. They even got Paul Krugman in on it. When NPR posts it on the website, I'll be back with a link.

[Shauk]

This is great Fooler App on facebook you can use their app to fabricate a custom new story with you in it. I got fooled by my friend who posted he got picked for a reality tv show, I went with the SWAT team being called on a loud video gamer one cuz if anyone knows me, it's that I'm rocking battlefield loud and proud.

[Jetée]

Your favorite fake products of April Fools' 2010.

e.g.


The iCade Cabinet

[snowy]

The piece from Talk of the Nation: Surprising Provision In Bill Shortens Months : NPR

If you like Paul Krugman, you must listen.

[Tully Mars]

That's priceless.

[Martian]

Youtube brings up TEXTp, to save bandwidth:

Originally Posted by youtube

TEXTp saves YouTube bandwidth, money

It’s great news that there are 24 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, we support 1080p and HD uploads are rising quickly, but that’s also meant increasing bandwidth costs cutting into our bottom line. And so, in our drive to keep expenses under control, we’ve decided that April 1 is the perfect day to take the important step of offering a new way to experience YouTube: text-only mode, or TEXTp.

TEXTp is the result of months of intense transcoding efforts by our engineers, who toiled for weeks to ensure that a large chunk of videos on the platform could be reduced to their most basic elements. By replacing the images in the video with a series of letters and numbers, the videos are far less taxing on our system -- and have the added benefit of promoting literacy!

To give it a whirl, make sure you have the latest Flash player (10.0) and click here. Or you can select “TEXTp” from the pulldown menu on most videos, as so:


You can also append &textp=fool to most video URLs to test it out.

For every person who selects TEXTp and keeps it on while you watch a video, you save YouTube $1 a second, resulting in potentially billions of dollars of savings for us. So if you care about YouTube, you’ll use TEXTp today.

Patrick Pichette, SVP and Chief Financial Officer, Google

[Manic_Skafe]

Navigation of the xkcd site is via command line interface only.