April Fools Day on the Web
April Fools Day 2011 was rife with all sorts of clever pranks, from the Metro’s rather obvious edible news papers to stories about recycling schemes for ebooks and even the news that Richard Branson had bought Pluto. And the internet was no place to hide to avoid being hoaxed.
Google itself advertised a job for an ‘autocompleter’ – someone who guesses what people are searching for in Google, and responds in real time to enable its auto complete function. Yeah right! And fans of Ribena on Facebook were largely not fooled by the mock up picture of a new tomato variant posted its official page. Yuk.
The jokers over at Google were also responsible for reverting YouTube’s look and feel to “it’s original design from 1911”. Who knew YouTube had been around decades before the internet itself!? Another pretty obvious April Fools right there, but they even went as far as creating a video of the top viral pictures from 2011.
However, few embraced their inner prankster more than the guys at thinkgeek.com, who added no fewer than eleven fake products to their eshop. These included a pair of ‘De-3D’ glasses which were said to eliminate the 3D effect from 3D movies and packets of green pork scratchings supposedly made from the green pigs from Angry Birds. But our favourite April Fools product from thinkgeek this year was their highly amusing Apple Store playmobil play set, designed to “fuse the fun and sensibility of playmobil with the design cliché and hubris of apple”. Maybe we are a tiny bit biased, what with Playmobil being one of our clients, but feel free to decide which is your favourite fake thinkgeek item.
We loved the accompanying video, a parody of an apple ad promoting the play set, which features a mini Steve Jobs presenting a keynote speech on an iPhone 4 transformed into a miniature plasma screen and a hilarious optional ‘line pack’ which would make kids “wait in line to get that chance to wait in line”. Other quotes such as “we wanted to define the experience of childhood and create a seamless transition to the new realities of adulthood” suggest that the thinkgeek team regard apple’s marketing as a little over the top.
Here’s the video, which has been a trending topic on Twitter and received over 400,000 views and 250 comments on YouTube.