april fool's

Google loves its April Fools' jokes, and this year a prank emerged in the form of CADIE--an artificial-intelligence research project with a cute panda avatar--taking over the search giant.

"We're pleased to announce that just moments ago, the world's first Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity (CADIE) was switched on and began performing some initial functions," according to a CADIE description accompanying the faux announcement.

The site pointed to CADIE's YouTube channel and CADIE's blog.

Among CADIE's abilities: • Gmail Autopilot, which answers your e-mail for you. •  Chrome updated for use with red-and-blue 3D glasses (… Read more

Back in 2007, we put out two April Fools' Day posts chronicling fake and absurd start-ups. One was a Google Maps mashup for rodent sightings in New York restaurants. The other was a prenatal version of Twitter where unborn children could post status updates. A few readers took the bait in the comment sections, but it appears our ideas weren't so far off, as both have come to fruition just a year and a half later.

The first is, true-to-form, a maps mashup where New York City residents can see where local eateries have had rat-related health code violations. … Read more

At first glance, you might mistake it for a profile of the latest gimmicky art photographer, but as you read you'll soon discover that you've been suckered by this year's installment of Popular Photography and Imaging's long tradition of April Fools pranks. This year, the magazine chose to pull your leg through its Web site, with a profile of a phoney photographer named Richard Baresall. The tale, complete with the trademark puns and zany humor that have endeared the magazine's editors with generations of photographers, is a bit more risque than I would have expected … Read more

Wikipedia might not take too kindly to pranks any other day of the year, but the anyone-can-edit encyclopedia sure had some fun with April Fools' Day.

The site revamped its "On This Day" section with events that actually did happen on April 1, but with the wording cleverly tweaked to make them sound ridiculous. "(In 1969) The British-born model Hawker Siddeley Harrier was introduced at a Royal Air Force event, becoming the only one in the 1960s to successfully perform on a short runway," Wikipedia's front page read. The Hawker Siddeley Harrier is actually an … Read more

Google does April Fools’: ‘Custom time’ and a Mars trip http://www.news.com/8301-13577_3-9907571-36.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

Microsoft, Yahoo agree on buyout price http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/04/01/14FE-april-fool-microsoft-yahoo_1.html

April Fools Day Spam Invades Google http://www.searchenginejournal.com/april-fools-joke-spam-invades-google-news/6637/

No foolin’–Storm worm is back http://www.news.com/8301-10789_3-9906880-57.html?tag=nefd.only

Windows: A Monopoly Shakes http://www.microsoft-watch.com/content/operating_systems/windows_a_monopoly_shakes.html

FORTUNE: Apple 2.0 Analyst: Apple's U.S. consumer market share now 21 percent http://apple20.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2008/04/01/analyst-apples-us-consumer-market-share-now-21-percent/… Read more

Eric Litman from WashingtonVC joins us to talk crap on idiotic startup founders, we invent a new social network for plants and apparently elephants can paint portraits, no joke. Oh, and by the way, your April Fools' joke isn't that funny.

Listen now: Download today's podcast

The word of the day is "prank." Unless maybe you're one of the ones who got taken in hook, line, and sinker, in which case it's "doh!"

If you haven't already noticed, today is April Fools' Day, but you probably have, since most pranksters seem to get an early start. No single April 1 hoax may have the heft of Orson Welles' War of the Worlds stunt the night before Halloween in 1938, and there aren't usually chores involved like the ritual post-Halloween clean-up of splattered egg whites, but nothing comes close … Read more

UPDATE: Gossip blog Valleywag decided to out this for what it is--an April Fool's joke. Oh, well, it would've been funny to see people pick up on it.

With the rise of "microblogging" services like Twitter that limit the number of characters in a post, URL-shortening sites like TinyURL and URLtea have taken off. A new service that just launched, Urlrurl, promises to step it up a notch by tracking the popularity of online memes that are tossed around the Web through viral link-sharing.

"Urlrurl.com stands out from other link shortening services because of its patented Relay-Stick algorithm," a release from the new start-up read, "which dives into the links put through its shortener and exposes common memes across the pages people are clicking on." That sounds pretty cool. It's also connected to the Twitter API, plugging it into one of the biggest pools of URL-shortening activity on the Web.

And there's more: "In early June, a free stats program will launch, as well as a premium service for bloggers and publishers," the release continued. "The premium service will allow publishers to register their site with Urlrurl.com and receive deep insight into how content and memes have traversed the web." Considering that no one can really tell where Internet memes emerge these days--4Chan, Fark, Digg, iVillage--this kind of service, provided it actually works, could give some interesting and oft-hilarious insights.

Urlrurl is headquartered in New York with development offices in China, and counts TechCrunch czar Michael Arrington among its angel investors.… Read more

It was bound to happen. After years of decline and the steadily rising tide of iTunes, Napster, Rhapsody, et al--CD numbers are now in free fall--and the LP has finally regained its position as the world's most popular physical music format! Boosted by sales of Radiohead's "In Rainbows," and Amy Winehouse's "Back to Black," LP sales edged past the CD a few weeks ago. Elvis Costello's upcoming release, "Momofuku," will only be offered as a hi-fi LP or low-fi download. The CD is on its way out.

The Compact Disc … Read more