Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right
dan tynan on Apr 03 2009 at 6:17 am | Filed under: Cringley, Da Web, Faux News, Foolishness, Google, Infoworld, Microsoft, Twit or Tweet
New Orleans has Mardi Gras, San Francisco has Halloween, and for those of us who spend too many of our waking hours on the Net, the biggest party of the year happens on April Fools Day.
Infoworld certainly did its part to add to the foolishness. It’s always a treat to see how ticked off some readers get about these stories, despite having “April Fools” stamped all over them. (FYI, I don’t recommend the humor bypass surgery — it has some nasty side effects.)
As for the rest of geekdom, it was a mixed bag.
I thought Google’s jokes were lame, mostly. Then again, it’s under a lot of pressure to top itself each year, and you know that can’t go on forever. The concept of unleashing an Artificial Intelligence engine on the Web which immediately transforms into anime-inspired Japanese tween with a fondness for pandas and unicorns is a funny concept, but doesn’t really work in a ha ha sort of way. Ditto for flipping YouTube videos upside down, Chrome 3D, and Gmail Autopilot, which automatically composes responses to your email.
On the other hand, the preview for Microsoft’s Xbox 360 title, Alpine Legend, was a hoot, despite the game’s “technical problems.” Don your lederhosen, grab your tri-horn, and party like it’s Austria in 1899. (Microsoft finally proves it can do something better than Google. Whoda thunk it?)
I also liked the UK Guardian’s decision to publish the newspaper exclusively via Twitter, boiling every story down to its 140-character essence and tweetifying all the stories in its 188-year history. To wit:
A mammoth project is also under way to rewrite the whole of the newspaper’s archive, stretching back to 1821, in the form of tweets. Major stories already completed include “1832 Reform Act gives voting rights to one in five adult males yay!!!”; “OMG Hitler invades Poland, allies declare war see tinyurl.com/b5×6e for more”; and “JFK assassin8d @ Dallas, def. heard second gunshot from grassy knoll WTF?”
Opera’s new face gesture browser interface is also pretty damned funny. Check out the following video for the details.
