April Fool's Wha?

Today, as most of the world knows, was April Fool's Day. I was sad about it falling on Sunday, because so many of the best jokes are played during the work week, and having it on Sunday makes it harder to be around gullible people. But the Internet didn't take a break from April Fool's; there are plenty of popular websites with fantastic gags, and I'm about to tell you where they are.

First off: Google. Google is known for their April Fool's Day jokes, and this year is no exception. Check out their "crappy" new service - I doubt anyone believed this for a second, but it's pretty hilarious. Be sure to look at the Google Group created for it, and if you want to see previous April Fool's Day jokes, just go to this fake "Not Found" page. Oh, Google, you never disappoint.

Gmail had it's own gag separate from Google proper - their new Gmail Paper service! Can you imagine getting all your emails sent to you in paper form? I bet some people would actually use this service, if it were real. And I'm willing to bet that more people believed this one than the TiSP service.

Livejournal, my other blogging home, really got me this year. Their news announcement about needing to be more competitive in the social networking market was almost believable. In fact, I had to look at the comments to see that this was just a gag and not my beloved Livejournal selling out to the MySpace overlords. Fantastic!

Facebook also had a few tricks up its sleeve in the form of news feed items. Since all of the other crap your friends do will ultimately cause these to get pushed out of your news feed, here's what they were:

"You are on Facebook, reading your News Feed."
"Harry and Voldemort have set their relationship status to 'Mortal Enemies.'"
"Two of your oxen drowned when you tried to ford the river."
"Bracket Buster: Ohio State and Florida have mutually agreed on a tie and will not play the Championship game."
"Meredith and McDreamy have changed their relationship status to "It's Complicated" ... oh wait ... "In a Relationship" ... oh wait ... "It's Complicated" again."

and finally:

"Introducing LivePoke(tm)! Facebook will dispatch a real live person today to poke a friend of your choice.*
*offer good for only the first 100 pokers in each network."

Also, if you looked at the bottom of your News Feed page, you would see:

"A (insert your name here) Production." (With name inserted, of course.)

And when you reloaded the page, other random names would appear as well.

LibraryThing didn't do much, but they did change their logo to say "LibraryStuff," which is still pretty funny.

And finally, the most ridiculous and hilarious gag of the day (in my opinion) was from Ask.com - apparently, they are going to team up with Kevin Federline. Oh, how I loves a good K-Fed joke!

What did you see today? Did anyone play any good jokes on you? Or did you get someone else really good? Whether you were the butt of the joke or the tormentor, I hope you all enjoyed your April ze first.