Ah, April Fools' Day—a time when the tech world unleashes its creativity, blending humour with innovation to concoct some of the most memorable pranks and gags. From fake product launches to tongue-in-cheek announcements, the tech industry never fails to entertain on April 1st.
My favourite is probably Google's ambitious "Project Virgle" prank, where they collaborated with Virgin Group to humorously announce plans for colonising Mars. The elaborate hoax, complete with a dedicated website and recruitment videos, captured the imagination of many, blending science fiction with April Fools' whimsy.
Share your favourites below; it's great to reminisce on the jokes of yesteryear.
Top comments (14)
Google Gmail: Two decades later, a look at Gmail — Google’s best April Fool’s joke - The Economic Times
Gmail started on April 1, 2004, as a free service boasting 1 gigabyte of storage per account. This may sound like nothing now, but in that time, it was considered a massive amount of email capacity. ETtech looks at its two-decade-long journey.
The longest con of all, I bet they're really laughing at us 😅
Here is the video for project Virgle, I can't believe it was 16 years ago!
Richard Branson on Virgle - YouTube
As of midnight PST, April 1st, 2008, we have stopped accepting applications.For more information about Project Virgle, please visit http://www.google.com/vir...
Also honourable mention to Google Tulip
Introducing Google Tulip - YouTube
We're excited to announce Google Tulip.Decoding the language of flowers has been a decades-long challenge. But that changes today. Thanks to great advancemen...
Lol, Project Virgle is freaking great. 🤣
I told my team I was quitting today
How long did you keep it up?
Not long, a few minutes at least lol
TIL about Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol and the origins of some of the stranger error codes like
418 I'm a teapot🫖One of my faves, my work quiz team is called four eighteen 😅
Execute your best ideas with Google Registry's .exe top-level domain
.exe allows you to execute your best ideas and make them a reality.
Or this one !
7 years ago, from Amazon
For Gradle lovers and haters, there is dev.to/onenashev/kradle-90-revolut... . Note that there is some truth to any joke ;)
I’m still learning full-stack development. I told my dad every day that I think I have memory loss, and he advised me to concentrate and put in more effort.