Apr
April Fools Day 2008 Wrapup
Well, if you’re a blogger, there’s no way you missed April Fools Day this year. Just about every blog had some sort of trick! 
However, it’s about quality, not quantity, so here are my thoughts:
My most anticipated prank was from Shoemoney, and his Make $1000 An Hour video turned out to be pretty cool. It was pretty obvious, but still funny… and the joke kept going through the comments, so it was a good time. (Some people were fooled though!)
John Chow partnered with Coca-Cola, which was OK. The Photoshopping was great, but it was a little too obvious to fool anyone.
And the Rick Rolling stuff was pretty boring. The one from Cow was plain obnoxious.
Zac Johnson started his own blog affiliate program, which wasn’t the funniest out there, but it was believable. 75 cents per click would have been a nice payout
Darren Rowse launched PayPerTweet, which was quite amusing, although I’m willing to bet that there is already a lot of “pay per tweeting” going on. Funny and believable, it was a good one.
It must have worked, too, because it seems more and more bloggers are jumping on the Twitter bandwagon. A coincidence, or are they looking to cash in? 
You could even sue Facebook. Granted there are lots of lawsuit jokes, but that post on TechCrunch was so funny anyway!
Jim Kukral was in there too. His joke was the post “Stop Asking Me to Digg Sh*t”… since that was posted on April 1st, it’s obvious that he actually wants you to send him tons of emails every day asking him to Digg your stuff.
My personal favorite prank was from Tim Ferriss, a master of outsourcing, who revealed that he even outsourced his personal blog! I was torn between “wow, he is a freakin genius, I want to do that, too” to “man, this would be a crazy good April Fools joke!”
Turns out it was a prank, and it was extremely fun and realistic. Kudos to him!
The big letdowns were people that pretended to sell their blog, which is way too common, and it’s been done so much before. There are so many things you could do, why bother with lame, old jokes like that?
It would be much better to joke about SEO firms or make tons of cash. (My jokes were obviously the best of the bunch, but they didn’t get much coverage because I don’t have thousands of noobs lurking around here looking for generic advice…)
Another great one was in the form of Blog Commentator. I was in on the joke, but apparently very few people were.
You know how I love spoofs, right? Well Blog Commentator was a spoof on all the “buy blog comments” style of comment spamming services. It even had contextual analysis technology like Google Adsense so it could analyze the blog post and leave a thoughtful comment that would in no way be recognized as spam!
Please take a look, it must have taken tons of work to do the full sales letter, ordering process, and wait list! I thought it was hilarious, but no one else joined in. I can only think of three reasons for that: 1) People are too dumb to appreciate a good April Fool’s Joke, 2) People are too lazy to look at it, or 3) Blog comment spamming is so common that bloggers are no longer passionate about it.
I didn’t mean to rant so long, but a lot of top bloggers give out press coverage to real comment spammers, but they ignore a great spoof about it? WTF?
Anyway, Happy April Fool’s Day!
Did I miss any good ones?
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Nice recap. I’m liking the new design.
Gmail’s custom time is a good one, I think.
Thank you Sucker for writing about my Blog Commentator prank!! I guess it looked too real though…
I woke up April 1 oblivious to the date, and did my normal routine checking email and the the RSS feed. My first blog to read of the day was from Domain Tools, and I stopped at this “The new system stops all trademark registrations before they happen. The technology uses proprietary algorithms and millions of whois queries and extensive history to come up with predictions on who will register any given domain name in the future.” I took me a few minutes to figure out what was going on.
Hey Jason - great idea but I don’t think it was over-the-top enough. It sounds too much like stuff that’s actually out there. The upside is that you can promote it year around and not just April 1. Put a form on the page and someone will buy it.
Best one had to be Youtube changing all the featured videos on its front page to Rick Rolls. I knew Rick Rolling was a popular thing to do, but didn’t think it was big enough that youtube or any company like that would do it.
Also, IGN created a huge fake Zelda movie trailer. Not a big fan of Zelda, but they spent a lot of cash on it and it wasn’t even very good at that :/
well it was not an April Fools day joke when I zapped my blog without a backup.
I really thought Blog Commentator was real as there are many similar products out there…
I agree, Blog Commentator could have been made a little more “over the top.” However, it was pretty over the top because none of the comment spamming places out there have something that leaves legitimate comments. (At least it fit into April Fool’s Day because it was real enough to fool some people!)
It needs some screenshots and examples though!