The Social

April Fools' Day has hit the Internet and, as usual, there's no shortage of fake news stories, gag product announcements, and corny jokes. Some are funny. Some are sort of lame attempts at being funny. Here are some of the ones we think are worth highlighting, and we'll be updating this throughout the day as we catch wind of more.

None of these links are Rickrolls. I promise. That is so 2008.

• A couple of blogs (including reputable tech stalwart Engadget) were legitimately punked by an early hoax: the "Hotelicopter," which claimed to be the world's first flying hotel--converted from an old Soviet military helicopter.
• Security blog TechJaws announced that Microsoft had finally acquired Yahoo. Um--yawn.
• One of the best April Fools' jokes this year comes from The Washington Post, with fake exploits of the much-hyped Conficker worm rolled up into what appeared at first to be a straight news story.

Gmail's "autopilot" filters
(Credit: Google)
• Google, known for its April Fools pranks, pulled an odd one this year with the introduction of a fake artificial intelligence research project called CADIE. Naturally, CADIE is a disaster: the project determines that the best Web design resembles something out of 1997's backwaters. (There's also a mobile "Google Brain Search," a Gmail "autopilot," and a 3D version of its Chrome browser.)
• The Google-owned YouTube played its videos upside down.
• Broadband media blog VideoNuze announced that YouTube and Hulu had merged but were still searching for a new name.
• Amazon Web Services unveiled a new plan for cloud-computing systems hosted on blimps.
• Ice cream company Ben & Jerry's created a fake Web site, Cyclone Dairy, which claims to only sell milk coming from cloned cows. But in a press release, Ben & Jerry's explained that it does hope the prank will raise awareness of the ethical and health issues surrounding cloned livestock.
• Social news site Reddit rebranded itself as "Reddigg," aping the color scheme and layout of its rival Digg.
• The U.K. newspaper The Guardian announced that it was shutting down both its print edition and Web site, turning instead to a Twitter-only format. "Experts say any story can be told in 140 characters," the announcement read.

Box.net's faux Twitter-stye service randomly cuts out parts of your words.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
• Box.net, meanwhile, argued that 140 characters is too long and launched a gag product called Chirper, which promised to shorten tweets to 50 characters for easier consumption. It actually works, but, um, we doubt you want to use it.
• Image-editing company Aviary announced "Crane," the world's first "paper based image editor," which uses a physical "Pencil Tool."

Opera's "facial gestures"
(Credit: Opera)
• The makers of the Opera browser announced that they were introducing face-gesture browsing.
• Social-network app company SGN, which owns the cutesy virtual pet app FluffFriends, dressed up its cartoon animals to look like killer mobsters. They still don't look very scary.
• College search site Unigo added a fake college, Cornmouth University, to its directory. Company employees have been Twittering that they spent spring break there.
• An e-book company called Smashwords put out a fake press release announcing that the entire "Harry Potter" series had been self-published on its service by author J.K. Rowling. Self-aggrandizement, anyone?
• Ladies! TechCrunch's Michael Arrington is hunting for a wife and has enlisted a matchmaker! "I understand I don't have much to work with here," she wrote on TechCrunch. "A sedentary 39 year old single man who made questionable career choices and now blogs for a living just doesn't look good on paper...As far as I can tell his diet consists almost entirely of burritos from Chipotle."
• Wikipedia's annual homepage makeover again tweaked its "In the News" and "Did you know..." section to put a fake spin on otherwise real stories. "HBO television network broadcast midgets racing for prizes in a chili bowl" is technically true, but it was actually midget-class race cars in an event known as the Chili Bowl.
  
  (Credit: Wikipedia)
• Microsoft created a fake trailer for a Guitar Hero-like Xbox 360 game called "Alpine Legend."
• A Digg employee created a fake Web development framework called "PHP on Rails" or "Phails," a pun on Ruby on Rails and PHP. In fact, it's a jab at the terrible marketing banter that's so prevalent in the developer world.
• The people behind the "Shorty Awards" ceremony earlier this year created a spoof page for "Twitter Pro" accounts and enlisted some friends to add "Pro" watermarks on their user pictures.
• Some guy created FreakingHugeURL.com for people who consider themselves too cool for URL shortening services like TinyURL and Bit.ly.
• And in what could turn out to be the biggest joke of all, that Conficker worm has turned out to have more bark than bite so far.

It was a marathon evening for media buffs as Barack Obama beat rival John McCain to become the United States' first African-American president-elect. You couldn't miss it on Twitter, as the microblogging service exploded with election updates, commentary, and speculation.

Miraculously, Twitter's servers lasted the night, and had quite a lot of terrific, 140-characters-long election commentary (in messages known as "tweets") to serve up for hungry news hounds. Here are 10 of CNET News' favorites.

10. One of Barack Obama's most-buzzed campaign innovations was announcing his running mate choice via text message. It not only bolstered the young candidate's image as the nominee of choice for tech-savvy youth, but it also gave his campaign a huge repository of cell phone numbers--and nobody was surprised when Obama used them on Election Day. It even got on some users' nerves: Twitter user FinanceGirl expressed her frustration: OMG, Obama! Please stop texting me!

9. In the interest of shameless self-promotion, this one comes from CNET News' own Josh Lowensohn, who asked at the conclusion of Obama's music-filled victory speech, This remind anyone else of the end of Return of the Jedi? With CNN using holograms to bring remote correspondents into the studio, Princess Leia-style, he's got a point.

8. If you were following the election feed on Twitter during Obama's acceptance speech, at one point, the conversation turned entirely to puppies. Backstory: Obama had promised his two young daughters that he'd give them a puppy if he won the election, and as he thanked his family in the speech, he mentioned that, yes, they'd get the dog. From the twittering masses came plenty of OMGs and adorable-speak, but Twitter user Dennis Yang had a different thought in mind: obama, do I get a puppy too?

7. Los Angeles-based twitterer Bill Palmer noticed that literally everyone caught election fever: homeless guy on Hollywood Blvd with a sign that says "Obama aint the only one who wants change"--now that's clever. McCain supporters, insert your own potshot about "spreading the wealth around" here.

(Credit: Twitter; The Onion)

6. One of the funniest Twitter accounts to follow during the election was the account for satire newspaper The Onion, and it was in high gear. Members of Twitter were encouraged to tag their tweets with #twitvote to provide election updates; The Onion naturally started planting fake ones. The best of the bunch: #twitvote 9:39 a.m. Dr. Monopoly Pumpernickel was denied a vote after he was shown to be nothing more than 3 small children in an overcoat.

5. Another pretty sweet tweet from The Onion: #twitvote: 5:57 p.m. Donald Pauley of Pickerington, OH fled the polling station when his voting machine asked, "Shall we play a game?"

4. As voting lines reached record lengths around the country, CrunchGear blogger Peter Ha told everyone via Twitter to calm down: If you can wait three+ days to buy a damned iPhone then you can wait (in) line to vote, a**hats. Crude, yes. But he gets his point across.

(Credit: Twitter; jdmcleodjr)

3. One of the biggest success stories of the election cycle--you know, besides the guy who won--was FiveThirtyEight.com and its owner, Nate Silver. The election prediction site sprang up out of Silver's experience predicting baseball results, and twitterers were in awe when FiveThirtyEight's predictions turned out to be almost completely dead-on.

Twitter user jdmcleodjr has some ideas for what he should do next: Incidentally, Nate Silver over at fivethirtyeight.com ought to take his act to Vegas. Well, if you've mastered baseball and national politics, there must be only one frontier left to conquer--poker!

2. It was a thrilling evening for Obama supporters, but some people have really been left out in the cold--namely late-night talk-show hosts and stand-up comedians who have said in the past that the now-president-elect simply isn't wacky enough for joke fodder.

Remember how thrilled comedians were when he learned that Obama was bad at bowling? They'll have to be more creative now, as Canadian comedian Peter Cianfarini twittered: Do you people have any idea how much more difficult you've made it for comedians? We needed McCain & Palin. I hope you're all proud! Defeated veep candidate Sarah Palin, after all, will be associated with Canadian comedy for years to come.

1. And our official "best election tweet" award goes to Twitter user JHix, who wrote about his voting experience: Officially just played the worst video game ever. You mark people with an "x" and then wait almost forever to find out who won.

LONDON--On Thursday afternoon at the Future of Web Apps conference, I had to make a choice: Was I going to blog about a talk hosted by Six Apart engineer David Recordon, talking about the "open social Web," or a talk by Ben Huh, the "Chief Cheezburger" of goofy "lolcat" meme site ICanHasCheezburger.com?

Recordon's talk would invariably be an insightful look into issues like OpenID and OpenSocial, which have faded from the headlines in recent months but are still a hot topic in the developer community. But the talk could prove to be code-heavy given the fact that the average FOWA attendee is a seasoned developer. As for Huh, listening to someone talk about pictures of cats would seem a little bit silly given the broader issues we're all facing. But as conference organizers reminded the FOWA attendees earlier in the day, Huh has actually built a successful business with his network of geeky entertainment sites.

So I opted for the cheezburgers. We could all use some levity these days.

Indeed, Huh, who has admitted that he is allergic to cats, provided a shortened version of the wacky story about how he arrived at the helm of I Can Has Cheezburger--because he was sick of his job, was telling a friend via instant message that he loved I Can Has Cheezburger, and the friend in question said, "So why don't you buy it?" He then convinced investors early last year to give him the money to buy the site from creators Eric Nakagawa and Kari Unebasami.

"That investment pitch sounds like nothing you've ever heard before," he said, but later said that the company has been "profitable since day one." They pull in 4 million page views per day, totaled 105 million views in the month of September, and make up a full 10 percent of blog host WordPress.com's traffic.

Huh's role at I Can Has Cheezburger, he explained, is running it like a smart and efficient business, which he says has allowed it to stay on top of things and not bleed through cash. His philosophy, rooted in the core principles of simplicity and obviousness, stands in pretty stark contrast to Web 2.0 outlets that have been all about APIs, platform strategies, widgets, Ajax, and what-have-you. Content syndication? Huh's idea of that is sticking a small I Can Has Cheezburger logo on all images uploaded to the site, providing an HTML embed code, and letting visitors do whatever they want with them.

Most important, he said, was building up community features to keep people coming back. Instead of catering to a small pack of rabid and hardcore users, he suggested working on the second and third tiers because they're much bigger. "Focus on the casual base, which is a really large percentage of users, who maybe visit once a week, once a month," he suggested to the developers in the audience. "You want to convert them so that they become fans. They grow your community."

He had a few more helpful hints: it's a worthwhile investment to buy the misspelled versions of your Web site name (you'd be amazed at how many people can't spell), but it's not a worthwhile investment to offer to pay contributors (the infrastructure is hell). Don't waste money building something in-house if it already exists for your use--i.e. commenting systems. Instead of paying for a slick design, pay to keep those servers up and running.

Above all, Huh told the FOWA audience to keep things simple, citing the "experiential difference" of Google beating Yahoo initially by just putting a search box on a mostly-blank page. "Technology people have a tendency to make simple problems incredibly complicated," he said--and that includes goals. I Can Has Cheezburger's goal is that "we want you to be happy for 5 minutes every day," he said. "That's a pretty low bar."

And I Can Has Cheezburger sister site FailBlog, he said, is really catching on in the face of financial turmoil.

The view from Hearst Tower at Founders Club.

(Credit: Marc le Clef)

NEW YORK--Thus far, my experience with the Internet Week New York party scene has one of dichotomies. On Wednesday I went from a lively dance floor to a room full of awkward male Kevin Rose groupies. Then, on Thursday, the social agenda involved one event that was impeccably classy and one that was so consciously puerile that it could only have come from CollegeHumor.

One more inch and this photo of America's Hottest College Girl (left) would be NSFW. She was honored at a party that coincided with but was not affiliated with Internet Week New York.

(Credit: Amandalyn Ferri)

The earlier gathering was the latest installment of Founders Club, a series of quarterly events that pull together a bunch of local A-list entrepreneurs with the VCs who fund them and the big-media folks who want to get to know them. The Founders Club circuit kicked off last winter, fueled by the contacts lists of popular local digerati like Blip.tv's Dina Kaplan and IAC exec Jason Rapp. While its original digs in an investor's penthouse were nothing to scoff at, the events have grown more upscale in venue, this time taking over a 44th-floor space at the tower occupied by publishing stalwart Hearst.

For most, it was an escape from the Internet Week fray and a chance to catch up over an organic vodka-on-the-rocks with the likes of Gawker Media publisher Nick Denton, News Corp. M&A exec Jeremy Phillips, digital-politics guru Andrew Rasiej, and Greycroft Partners' Alan Patricof. A few out-of-towners were in attendance too, like Digg founder Kevin Rose, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, and Facebook/Napster/other-stuff-in-the-Valley veteran Sean Parker.

The crowd at the Founders Club event on Thursday night.

(Credit: Marc le Clef)

The most prolific topic of conversation: the fantastic views of Central Park and midtown Manhattan, including The New York Times building further south on Eighth Avenue--two arguably unstable exhibitionists had attempted to scale the outside of the building earlier in the day.

But the open bar and live jazz trio at Founders Club tapered off around 9 p.m., and several taxis full of fun-loving partygoers headed downtown to the flashy, chandelier-adorned Flatiron District nightclub known as Room Service, where the IAC-owned CollegeHumor was having its annual Hottest College Girl in America Party. The 2008 honoree was 19-year-old Alison from the University of Wisconsin, who eventually wants to be a high school English teacher. (Note to Alison: Those photos on CollegeHumor might make the average American high school think twice when you submit your resume.)

You know, it's kind of unfortunate that CollegeHumor co-founders Josh Abramson and Ricky Van Veen hadn't scheduled their party for the previous night. I would've paid a few dollars to see Alison and her barely-clothed friends transported to the Digg party; maybe then those Digg fanboys would've diverted their attention to something other than their lionized Kevin Rose.

(Credit: Ricky Van Veen, editor in chief, CollegeHumor)

With a $15 billion valuation, big-name investors, and high-profile Google employees jumping onto its payroll, Facebook can't play with the kids anymore.

That's probably why its New York branch's hyped-up beer pong tournament against dude entertainment site CollegeHumor was cancelled.

The match, scheduled for Thursday evening at CollegeHumor parent company Connected Ventures' offices near Manhattan's Union Square, was abruptly called off, according to a blog post from Josh Mohrer, director of retail at Connected Ventures brand BustedTees. "Facebook has backed out of the CH vs. Facebook beer pong tournament for 'legal and PR' reasons," Mohrer wrote. "Lame!"

For those who stepped in late, beer pong, known as "beirut" in some circles, is a popular slacker sport that involves throwing ping-pong balls at a triangle of cups half-full of beer. If you land the ball in a cup, your opponent must drink the beer in that cup. That's the basic rundown; rules and regulations differ wildly across the fabric of American college campuses.

A tipster told gossip blog Valleywag that Facebook's legal and public-relations team, which just hired former Googler Elliot Schrage as its director, took issue with the tournament.

A CollegeHumor representative told CNET News.com that the company was not familiar with Facebook's "internal stuff" and that an impending match between CollegeHumor and local blog powerhouse Gawker Media was still on the books.

Facebook declined to comment on the matter.

To be fair, Connected Ventures isn't exactly a freewheeling start-up: CollegeHumor has been around since the late '90s, its founders are closer to 30 than 20, and Connected Ventures (which also encompasses BustedTees and video-sharing platform Vimeo) was acquired by Barry Diller's InterActiveCorp nearly two years ago.

Regardless, CollegeHumor remains an entertainment brand. Facebook gets talked about in the same sentences as Google and Microsoft--it might've gotten its start as a dorm room project at Harvard, but Mark Zuckerberg & Co. is playing in the Silicon Valley big leagues now.

At the same time, Facebook still has to prove that it can live up to the hype. Google and Amazon.com executives can get away with showing up at the Nevada counterculture fest Burning Man, but Facebook still has a "college kid" reputation to outgrow.

In other words, beer pong probably doesn't help.

Media "discovery" site StumbleUpon announced Tuesday that its video service, Stumble Video, has a host of new content available: content sites College Humor, Funny or Die, and VBS.tv, as well as video-hosting sites Vimeo, DailyMotion, and Veoh.

Stumble Video, which uses past preferences to pick out videos that a member might like--in other words, a nifty procrastination tool--already amasses content from big sites like YouTube, MySpaceTV, and Metacafe.

StumbleUpon was acquired by eBay last year, about six months after it debuted the Stumble Video feature. There's also a specialized version of Stumble Video for Nintendo's Wii console.

Now go ruin your productivity level. As for me, Stumble Video just told me I might want to watch some Daft Punk videos.

Rick Astley and Mr. Met: A match made in heaven?

(Credit: Sarah Harbin/CNET Networks)

The title of this post was inspired by Deadspin commenter BlastItBiggs.

After April Fool's Day, it got horribly gauche to practice the art of "Rickrolling"--tricking people into watching the video for Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up," or surprising someone by playing the corny pop song. The goofy Internet fad was so utterly overblown on 4/1/08 that the Web seemed to collectively agree that nobody should ever subject anybody to it again.

The New York Mets, however might have to deal with it for a little while longer.

Innocently enough, the baseball team decided to hold an online contest to determine the tune for its traditional eighth-inning sing-along. Despite the fact that the "Stephen Colbert Bridge" debacle should've taught the world a lesson about the perils of online polls, the contest included a write-in option. Prank-friendly geek hubs Digg and Fark linked to the poll, and sure enough, "Never Gonna Give You Up" came out on top.

MetsBlog.com reported that the song played at 4:03 p.m. EDT during the Mets' season opener against the Philadelphia Phillies, who ended up beating the Mets 5-2.

But this might be the only Mets game to get Rickrolled. Gawker Media sports blog Deadspin reported that when the Digging and Farking masses flooded the contest with votes for "Never Gonna Give You Up," the powers-that-be at Shea Stadium decided to issue a mulligan, sort of.

"Rather than commit to that as the new eighth-inning tune since it probably doesn't reflect the fan base's wishes, the Mets will play the top six selections once apiece during the first six games of their home stand," a New York Daily News article linked on Deadspin read. "The one that draws the largest crowd response will stick." Hey, Rick's still got a chance.

And considering the Mets haven't won a World Series since Rick Astley was popular the first time around, "Never Gonna Give You Up" might be a good choice regardless.

CNET News.com's Tom Krazit contributed to this report by noticing the Rickroll mention as he obsessively hit "reload" on MetsBlog.com all afternoon hoping to learn that his beloved Kings of Queens had actually won a game. Sorry, dude.

Greenpeace might want to save the whales, but it's not above giving them silly names.

The legendary environmental organization, as part of its Great Whale Trail Expedition campaign, is tracking humpback whales in the South Pacific via satellite tags and hoping to gather data that will help protect them from hunting. To humanize the massive cetaceans a bit, Greenpeace International is also holding a whale-naming competition in the form of an online poll. It appears, looking at the site, that a number of "winning" names will go to the array of whales being tracked.

Looks like one humpback whale's going to be making a real splash.

(Credit: Greenpeace)

Among the 30 finalists, which were chosen from over 11,000 submitted, are names like Cian ("ancient" or "enduring" in Irish), Anahi ("immortal" in Persian), Kigai ("strong spirit" in Japanese) and Humphrey (after that whale who could've used GPS). There's also "Mister Splashy Pants," which appears to have been included among the other 29 names as an "oh, what the heck" entrant.

We're not sure if Greenpeace actually expected anyone to choose it among the list of sweet and profound ethnic monikers, but "Mister Splashy Pants" is currently swimming away with a whopping 68 percent of the vote.

The lesson stands true: When it comes to online polls, expect the unexpected.

(Credit: Columbia Pictures)

Let's just say this Superbad flick, which opens August 17, is pretty highly anticipated. Comedy fans are psyched because it's produced by Judd Apatow of The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up fame. And geeks have been equally pumped to see teen nerd icon Michael Cera, formerly of Arrested Development and more recently of the CBS Web series Clark and Michael, doing what he does best--spending long durations of onscreen time acting as awkward as possible.

So, as you can imagine, the atmosphere was decently enthusiastic when the crew behind National Lampoon heir apparent CollegeHumor threw an advance screening at a movie theater in midtown Manhattan on Wednesday night. (The movie, as far as I know, does not have any formal connection to the site.) A raunchy and offbeat comedy about nerds, after all, is just about tailor-made for the brand: CollegeHumor parent company Connected Ventures, itself owned by InterActiveCorp (IAC), has inexplicably managed to cater to a three-pronged target audience of frat boys, tech culture geeks, and hipsters with a proclivity for ironic t-shirts. Well, perhaps it's not so inexplicable, as all three demographics likely would be amused by photos of passed-out drunks with "I <3 JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE" scrawled on their foreheads next to cartoon simulacra of male reproductive organs--which, by the way, are a crucial motif in Superbad.

The audience at the movie screening, consequently, seemed to enjoy itself. And as for my personal review: See it. It's funny. The cops are the best part. But it sure made me feel old to see how high school movies have evolved in this post-Napoleon Dynamite era, from the She's All That and American Pie knockoffs we had back in my day. Freddie Prinze, Jr. seems quite a bit antique.

Afterwards, CollegeHumor took over the bi-level midtown bar Mantra for a Svedka-sponsored soiree. Being a Wednesday night, the crowd wasn't too wild, and the music was a bit too loud for a bunch of outgoing 20-somethings who were eager to flex their senses of humor. (In other words, conversation bordered on difficult.) As for familiar tech-industry faces, the majority of those present seemed to be employees of Connected Ventures' various divisions or close friends thereof; however, representatives from local tech and new-media names like area/code, Next New Networks, and blip.tv were in the mix, as was Facebook's "New York guy," Kevin Colleran.

CollegeHumor co-founders Josh Abramson and Ricky Van Veen were understandably present. But to all Valleywag readers who care about the latest trivialities in New York's geek dating ecosystem, I didn't spot Vimeo founder Jakob Lodwick, so I would not be able to tell you whether he had Star magazine journo-socialite (journalite?) and rumored squeeze Julia Allison with him. Sorry. But hey, the movie was good.