Tim Malone.id.au

I know it’s Saturday now, but if you’re one of those people who think the day doesn’t change until the sun comes up, then it’s still April Fools Day now…so the title of this post makes sense.

I almost forgot it was April Fools Day today. If I remembered, I would have set my parents’ clocks forward an hour. It would have been fun seeing them (or getting their phone calls) when they got to work an hour early .

But I didn’t remember until I was on my way to work. Hungry Jacks/Burger King’s new burger was on the radio. They created the Left Hand Whopper – it has all the same ingredients as a normal whopper, they’re just rotated 180 degrees to make eating easier for the lefties among us. Hmmm….

That wasn’t all though. I got to work and was told that one of my friends was in hospital, and then realised it was a joke so I joined in on it with another friend. We ended up freaking someone out by saying he was dead….woops!

Then I visited my home forums – Cre8asite Forums. I had forgotten what we’d organised a few days beforehand, and as I visited, things were just starting to come into place. We flipped our avatars upside down for a bit of fun, but the best part was the announcement of our decision to sell the forums. Administrator Bill Slawski wrote up a press release explaining the changes we were making, to ensure that the forums were “a more attractive takeover target for some Venture capitalists and suitors from some of the larger online publishers”. Some of our changes included renaming the Website Hospital forum to Design Eye for the Ecommerce Guy, and stirring up controversy in the Usability forum with the new title, Usability Must Die. We also announced our intentions to change all the text to orange, adopt military style ranks for posters, create an eBay style reputation system, an add even more smilies to our currently very extensive collection.

People believed us, too. In our newly renamed Forum Issues That We’ll Ignore forum, Elizabeth and Donna both mentioned how we got them until the “Usability Must Die” part, whereas Paul got all the way through our new forum name suggestions!

Honorary Member Tam also told us about what she did on her forum, which is an idea for us to keep in mind for next year.

It wasn’t just us having fun either. On their blog, SearchEngineWatch made a rundown of pranks pulled within the search industry, including Google’s new underwear store and Gulp drinks, Ask Jeeves’ search robot, and the MSN friend-pranker search results. Don’t ask me how this one works though.

So all in all it was a good day, and it was fun to share it with the search engine community. I know we at Cre8asite already have plans for next year….