by Fox Van Allen for Techlicious
7 Best April Fools Jokes on the Internet
Not to alarm you, but the world has turned upside down since you went to bed last night. Barack Obama has been replaced with a small child. Social network Twitter is now charging you to use it. And YouTube is about to shut down now that it’s ready to pick its winner.
None of it is real, of course – they’re all April Fools jokes from around the Internet. Each year, the Internet’s largest sites all have a little fun, pulling pranks and making fake announcements for weird new services. Here are seven of Techlicious’ favorite pieces of foolishiness this year, collected from our top sites.
1. Gmail Blue
How do you completely redesign and recreate something while keeping it exactly the same? The answer is Gmail’s April Fools prank for 2013: Gmail Blue.
The joke here is that Blue, as shown in the YouTube video Google created, is exactly identical to the current version of Gmail. The only difference is that everything on the Gmail Blue site is colored blue. Google hails it as a technological advance six years in the making, and walks you through some of the challenges behind the not-so-groundbreaking innovation.
“We tried orange, brown,” explains Dana Popliger. “Brown was a disaster.”
2. Google Treasure Maps
Google’s Maps site offers a completely different joke: “Treasure mode.” The interactive feature will have you holding your tablet up to the sun to reveal watermarks, working with your friends’ devices to put together pieces of the map, and, of course, exposing your laptop to fire to reveal the heat-sensitive markings. With the right know how and a little bit of ingenuity, you’ll be able to find the lost gold of William Captain Kidd, which we presume you’ll need to replace that laptop you just set on fire.
3. Google Nose
If you’ve ever wondered what a ghost smells like, today is your lucky day. Google’s search site made light of the weird-but-true Google Glass project by announcing Google Nose beta, a self-described “new scentsation in search.”
I can’t say I’ve ever needed help to identify smells – when something smells bad enough, I’d prefer the origin stay a mystery. But for the rest of you, Google Nose offers 15 million scentibytes, Android Ambient Odor Detection (sorry, no iOS support yet), and AdScent beta for businesses, all in the highest resolution possible.
And before you ask: Yes, Google Nose does offer “safe search.” If only my gym bag did the same.
This excerpt appears with the permission of Techlicious.
