March 28, 2010
Pranks of the past
As April Fool’s Day approaches, it may be amusing to review pranks of the past.
- For starters, let me link to some of the posts I’ve made pointing to April Fool’s pranks in past years, including:
- (2009) A wonderful spoof of the analyst business
- (2009) Donald Farmer’s hilarious version of business intelligence
- (2009) The Guardian’s translation of its news and archives to tweets (“OMG Hitler invades Poland, allies declare war see tinyurl.com/b5×6e for more”)
- (2009) Google’s world-dominating, blog-writing AI with the personality of a pre-adolescent girl
- (2009) Expedia’s space-travel offering
- (2008) Netezza’s green box
- (2008) LOTRO’s spoof quests — like other MMO folks, the Lord Of The Rings Online guys can be really funny. (But in retrospect I’m not so sure they were spoofs so much as a new comedic option in the game introduced on a cleverly-chosen date.)
- (2007) My attempt to one-up Scoble et al., without much success.
- (2002) A classic: Google PigeonRank
- I found a couple of sites that catalog April Fool’s pranks around the world (not just techie ones). The Museum of Hoaxes offers a curated approach, so their list is pretty funny. Another site lists just about every web hoax anybody bothers to submit, so it’s quality is more mixed (and a lot of the links now don’t work).
- While thinking about this post, I recalled and posted about some software industry pranks. The MSA/M&D ones still boggle my mind, but I couldn’t think of much else to match them.
- And then, of course, there was the time this blonde joke made, as it were, the rounds.
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[...] My recent roundup of past years’ April Fool’s highlights [...]