The expression of April Fools’ Day has taken on extra dimensions with the proliferation of the web hoax, and has developed far enough to generate a pronounced backlash (if there’s one thing the Internet does better than anything else, it’s backlash.) Rod Begbie had an early screed against the lesser efforts while Anil Dash’s Your April Fool’s Joke Sucks formalized the following as frequent failures in funny:

• Swapping your stylesheet (past offender: Slashdot)
• “[Small company] got bought by [big company]!” (past offender: small companies)
• “We’re reversing our position on a major issue!” (past offender: any polemical software developer)
• “Exciting new product released!” and its common variant “Impossible new product released!” (past offender: too many to list)

Lukewarm examples have populated the Mac news microverse for perhaps a decade, and have long since worn out their tenuous grip on amusement - “Microsoft buys Apple!” “Apple releases the new iHovercar!” “Apple announces a mobile phone!”. Others have coined their own pejorative term for the hoaxing, including “Internet Jackass Day,” “Christmas for Idiots,” and “Tell an Unfunny Lie Day.”

The parallel in pre-Internet days is represented well in CNN’s atrocious list of Top 10 April Fools’ work pranks which range from cheap gag to outright mean-spirited harassment (advertising a co-worker’s home for sale?). The fake product release has become so widespread that it is now considered poor form to announce a real product on April 1st to avoid being mistaken for a hoax (e.g. Gmail, merger of Squaresoft and Enix).

The underwhelming repetition of these styled hoaxes is counterbalanced by some genuinely clever efforts, typically marked by the evident effort put into them. Blizzard, Google, HowStuffWorks and ThinkGeek are regular contributors with elaborate features that appeal to a geekier audience. In typical fashion, the Web also serves as an exhaustive reference both to itself, with numerous sites offering indexes of other sites participating in the practice, and the trend at play such as HowStuffWorks tracing the history of All Fools Day. You can also still visit some of the better web jokes from previous years, like Google’s PigeonRank, NanoColo (colocate your Linux server on an iPod Nano), and SQL on Rails.

Today’s Notable Efforts:

• Blizzard announces new Bard epic class - the interface should be familiar to Guitar Hero fan. My favorite of theirs today is actually The Molten Core console port, but it’s even more of an in-joke.
• Gmail’s Custom Time lets you send critical messages back in time. Note both their workaround for the Grandfather Paradox and the testimonial by a professor of epistemology.
• Google’s Project Virgle (in concert with Virgin Galactic) takes aim at terraforming Mars. While tongue-in-cheek, the plan is surprisingly well-developed.
• Propellerheads announces Reason Accordions. I want more accordion techno and accordiotronica!
• Tidbits reveals New Title Suggestions for Take Control series. While some are a mite pedestrian, I liked the Taking Control/Letting Go combo, Ordering a Drink at Starbucks®, and Take Control of Chaos:
  

  Learn to catch butterflies in Asia before they become tornados in the Americas. Build your own tipping points with simple tools and household materials. If you and your initial conditions have ever been codependent, if you have ever fallen under the spell of a strange attractor, or if you have ever wanted to learn how to bake fractal mandelbrot (excellent with coffee!), this non-linear dynamic book will shift your paradigms and renormalize your life.

• Tidbits covers the Federal court ruling on ‘email bankruptcy’

Other References:

• Museum of Hoaxes Top 100 April Fools’ Day Hoaxes
• April Fools’ Day on the Web
• Wikipedia for April 1, 2008 (entries for most of the last decade also available)