It's slightly easier this year, with April Fools Day falling on Easter Monday, a traditional holiday here in the United Kingdom. There's slightly less appetite for tech news today, so I don't need to try and guess what is on the edge of possibility and being played for laughs, what is just plain silly, and try to decide on the edge cases.
I guess that many writers are remember the incredulity at the news, back on April 1st 2004, that Google was going to launch a free to use, web based, email service that would have 1 gigabyte of storage for every user - at a time when Hotmail was offering a few megabytes. Going back to that original press release, it's a delightful bit of subversion:
Today, a handful of users will begin testing the preview version of Gmail. Unlike other free webmail services, Gmail is built on the idea that users should never have to file or delete a message, or struggle to find an email they’ve sent or received...
According to Page and Brin, Google will make the preview test version of Gmail available to a small number of email aficionados. With luck, Gmail will prove popular to them – and to the original user who sparked the idea.
When it was still there on April 2nd, only then did I start to take notice.
At least in the United Kingdom the mainstream media know to push up the satire to eleven, witness The Guardian's 'Guardian Googles' ability to "offer immersive liberal insights" no matter where you are. Unfortunately not everyone is as over the top, and the RSS feeds, Twitter streams (sorry twttr strms), HurdlePile stacks, and Facebook timelines fill up with pointless stories that seem designed to inflate the egos of those that create the stories and cruelly cheat the reader. Seriously Nissan, I'm all for the Turbo Toastie Maker ("Super hot snacks in double quick time - just watch out for that 'turbo' button...") and you deliver and take it away from me in just a few moments? That's not fair!
Shall I drive up my frustration levels and pick through the scraps and try and guess which is technology and which is magic? Or shall I just check out for the day and watch the Red Sox' Lester take on the Yankees's Sabathia on Opening Day?
