April Fools 2011: Pranks Around The Web

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Top April Fools 2011 Pranks Online

Google – Motion gaming has become extremely popular over the past few years with the Wii, Move, and Kinect. Now Google wants to make Gmail motion controlled, thus launching Gmail Motion. No keyboard or mouse needed, hand and body gestures will control everything for you. All of this is detailed on the custom site Google launched for April Fools day. The motion functionality even looks to extend to Google docs, for which Google also created a custom site experience. Another Google prank you will notice when typing in a search today is a job open for autocompleters, and you only need to type 32,000 words per minute to apply.

YouTube - In honor of April Fools, YouTube decided to go retro and give users a feel for what it would have been like for the business in 1911. They even have 1911 logos on all YouTube videos, and when you click it, the video will transform into a vintage, silent, motion picture. Everything will turn to a dirty and grainy yellow accompanied by old-school piano music, looking something like a Charlie Chaplin film.

ThinkGeek – A couple changes popped up on ThinkGeek today, with one being an X over the M in the word masses of their slogan: “stuff for smart masses.” Additionally they have a variety of new products that look to be fake, which is their traditional technique, however in years past some of these prank products have become the real deal. This year some of the fake products include an Apple Store playset, Angry Birds Pork Rinds, Star Wars Light Saber Popsicles, The Original Shirt Plate, and a USB Desktop Nether Portal.

CollegeHumor – When you arrive at the site it appears as if you are logged into their web admin as Intern22, and when you click the admin access it goes into what looks like a fully functional admin panel. However the joke is on you as it does not work, and when you go back to the homepage the folks at CollegeHumor.com confirm that you have been tricked by their April Fools 2011 prank.

GrooveShark – My favorite online music site looks a bit different today, as they decided to harness the power of HTML 5 to bring their users 3DS+. This new technology allows listeners to experience music in the third dimension. They have a link to their blog where you can print out the ridiculous accessories to help you hear the 3DS+ experience.

Mozilla (Firefox) – Many of you reading this may be using Mozilla Firefox, and if you do not want to deal with April Fools pranks online for the rest of the day, then you can get an add-on to fix that. The DNF (Do Not Fool) add-on will let you set the browser to opt-out of April Fools jokes, via a Do Not Fool HTTP header with every click or page view in Firefox.

FunnyorDie – Last year Justin Bieber took over, and now it looks like the recent web fame of Rebecca Black and her song Friday are taking over, with the site renamed FridayorDie. Since many view this as one of the worst songs ever, it is not surprising that FunnyorDie took a stab at it for April Fools. The entire site is now plastered with everything Rebecca Black, so it looks like her 15 minutes of fame will continue a bit longer.

Groupon – When you are a multi-billion dollar company, you better go big for April Fools. Groupon has been raising money and acquiring companies for the last year, and now they have a patent application for the phrase: “April Fools.” They even designed a full PDF patent application where you can see all the funny details.

Reddit – Over the last year Reddit has become increasingly popular, and is now a major part of the Conde Nast business. Reddit, not to be outdone this year for April Fools, decided to launch Reddit Mold, which seems to be almost as good as the real Reddit, but with a few disadvantages. Comments limits go from 500 to 490, but you get access to a secret members-only lounge. Apparently things can get worse, if more people give you Reddit Mold, so be careful.

ZippyCart will be updating this post throughout the day with any new and exciting April Fools’ Day pranks of 2011. Keep your eyes peeled and while you wait, checkout ZippyCart.com for more...

Infographic: The Environmental Impact Of Computing

I LOVE infographics! They beautify and clarify raw data — they're very compelling, visually appealing, they clearly present complex information and make facts and statistics easy to share and understand. Are you into infographics too?

It's amazing how even small changes to your daily lifestyle can have a huge impact on our planet. If you are planning to buy a new computer any time soon, please recycle your old hardware or consider donating it to your local school or public library, or find a worthwhile cause or charity in your area.

I've been a strong supporter of an eco-friendly lifestyle for a long time, and I've been recycling and re-using stuff for years. I think the first time I learned about recycling was in 1971 when I was just a young kid, and now it's just the way I do things. It's a good habit to get into in my opinion. It's really not too difficult and has a huge impact on the environment. Do you recycle?

Recycle, re-use or re-purpose: it just makes good sense!



Here is the text contained in the infographic...

The Environmental Impact Of Computing

More than 285,000,000 new computers will be sold this year.

The manufacturing of these machines will require
→ 25 million tons of fossil fuels. More than the whole state of Iowa consumes in one year.
→ And 39 million gallons of water — enough to fill sixty-five Olympic swimming pools.

180,000,000 Old computers will be replaced...
→ 35 million will end up in landfills, along with their contents of lead, barium, chromium and other materials that disrupt the human central nervous system.

There are over 1 billion computers in use worldwide and that number is set to double by 2014.

Today, between the hours of 9:00 & 5:00 these computers will use 1.7 million megawatts of energy.
→ Enough to power Yankee Stadium for every home game until the 2596-2597 season.

An average PC monitor, when left on all the time consumes upwards of 1,100 kilowatt-hours each year. Over two times more energy than a new refrigerator.

The electricity used by the average desktop computer each day will produce roughly:
• 4-1/4 lbs. of CO² the equivalent of adding 2 miles to your commute each day... or a road trip from Seattle to New York over the course of your computer's lifetime. If the screen brightness was reduced, this trip could be cut as short as Chicago.

Tonight, if all computers were shut down instead of being put in sleep mode they will save enough energy to light up the Eiffel Tower 24 hours a day for another 720 years.

Sources:

» Reuters.com, EnergySavers.gov, NYTimes.com, EnergyStar.org, Slate.com

This I am Green Infographic is brought to you courtesy of the fine folks at InfographicWorld. They specialize in the creation of viral infographics — both for your enjoyment, and for companies to help drive traffic and exposure to your website. Check out more of their work on the web at www.InfographicWorld.com. You can get their updates if you follow them on Twitter at @InfographicWrld. I do ;)

Google Shines On With Chrome

Google just released their new "One box for everything" browser called Chrome. The name is a direct reference to the term used to describe a desktop software application's interface elements. The name also implies "shiny and new" which it definitely is. The current beta is only available for Windows users, and unfortunately the Mac and Linux versions are not out yet and it's not clear when they'll hit the street.

Do We Need Another Browser, But Why?
Google's goal and concept for Chrome was that, "spend much of our time working inside a browser" and the "web gets better with more options and innovation." They also wanted to "completely rethink the browser" and create "a modern platform for web pages and applications." Let's see what develops in the near future, but so far things are impressive.

It's Got That Creamy Goodness
All the code is open source, and they've "used components from Apple's WebKit and Mozilla's Firefox" and under the hood they built V8, a more powerful JavaScript engine which should keep even extremely complex web apps in control. That said, Chrome is blazing FAST! It's also CSS3 capable, so users will have a better overall experience. The interface is kinda Microsoft Vista looking and very simple which makes it easy to use since there are only a limited number of features so far. Some of the features are: DNS pre-fetching, gears, phishing & malware protection, dynamic tabs, and "incognito mode" (ala Safari?). There's also a cool little feature called "Task Manager" where you type about:memory in the location bar to see the current memory usage for your browsers... Looks like Firefox is a RAM hog with all my Add-ons, extensions and plugins installed. You can see the full list of features and video explanations on their features page.

Give Google Chrome a try...
Download Google Chrome »

Geeky Stuff &mdash Get Your Geek On
Here are some fun things you can do already, remember this is just an initial beta release! I'm sure the folks at Google have lots of cool stuff on the way.

• Highlight some text or page elements and right-mouse-click and choose "Inspect element" to see a developer inspector (Firebug-like) which allows you to see the DOM and mess with it, and you can dock/un-dock to the window or view it in a tab, and do some other nifty things... [This is an awesome feature]


• Type about:memory in the location bar to see your memory use.


• Find more helpful info on GChrome here or get more GChrome developer info here.


• Type about:version in the location to get your current installed version of GChrome.


• Or, check the version "About Google Chrome" from the wrench menu, and it'll even tell you if your installed version is up to date.

Or make your Firefox new and shiny with this:
Chromifox 1.0rc2 Theme

...another blatant rip-off of another default theme from another great open source web browser! This time, the target is Google Chrome, or more specifically Chromium, the open source project behind it. The clean lines, slick layout, and compact style of Chromium were the points of inspiration for this theme. Chromifox offers a coat of Chrome for Firefox.