April Fools’ Day

April Fools’ Day, April Fools Day is almost upon us. You can be forgiven if you hadn’t even thought about it yet. For most people it’s just a mildly diverting day of spotting pranks in amongst news articles and listening carefully to what your friends tell you in case they’re trying to trick you. For us at The Next Web, it’s become a day of inbox tedium thanks to a kind of PR pitch that has grown in popularity in the past few years.

April Fools in the media used to simply be restricted to one article in every newspaper and the occasional TV news prank. Now thanks to the Internet there are far more online news outlets and each and every one of them wants to get in on the April Fool game. That’s not all – the rise of easy online publishing tools means that everyone is a potential media outlet. That includes businesses, and those businesses want to fool us too.

Of course, there’s not much point putting together a joke video about launching your product on Mars or writing a hilarious blog post about how you’ll now be serving a daily meal to each of your server hosting customers (it’s a pun on the word ‘serve’ – geddit? HA!) if no-one notices. That’s why the past few years have seen a rise in the following type of email hitting our inboxes at TNW during the final week of March:

Dear The Next Web,

Here at Nondescript Startup That You Wouldn’t Write About Normally Because We’re Boring (TM) we’re going to be running a hilarious April Fools video on our website.

If you’d like to write about it, we can give you advance access as long as you promise not to publish your post until noon on April 1st.

Is it just us, or does this kind of thing take the fun out of April Fools Day? We love hunting down whatever crazy pranks Google has up its sleeve (if recent years are anything to go by, it’ll have a lot – unless Larry Page has done a Spring Cleaning on fun), and who knows, when tomorrow rolls around (Easter Monday too, no less, so it will probably be a slow news day) we may well share funny April Fools pranks we find from all sorts of companies. But ‘find’ is the key word in that sentence.

An April Fools joke should be something for people to discover, find funny and share. If you’re pre-briefing the media so that they’re in on it, it just becomes a depressingly tedious publicity stunt.

April Fool’s Day Joke

April Fool’s Day Joke, Last year we showed you some famous and memorable pranks that worked, including the flying penguins introduced on BBC and Australia’s “metric time” announcement. But 2011 and 2012 have produced some other great pranks and we have many gems for you to see.

While leaders of the major political parties were canvassing the country during an election campaign, some reporters decided to have a little fun with the late Jack Layton and his trademark moustache. Reporters made their own moustaches and attached them to their upper lips with tape for an Apr. 1 press conference.

The Vancouver Courier reported last April the next phase of the city’s bicycle infrastructure may include an underwater tunnel. The tunnel would connect the downtown peninsula to the rest of the city and save cyclists from riding over the bridges. Cyclists would be able to see undersea wildlife at one part of their trip through the tunnel and even fill up their tires with air at another station. The Courier reported the tunnel would cost between $340 million and $420 million. While the plan enraged some, it would be great for cyclists and keep them dry for part of their commute in the damp and rainy city, the fake report concluded.

Last year YouTube claimed to have started 100 years prior. It said the homepage looked as it did back in 1911 and featured vintage black-and-white videos from the time.