April Fool's Day Archive, Contents:

Chilefoundry.com warned that the federal government was planning to classify Capsaicin (the component of chili peppers that gives them their heat) as a controlled substance. Seeds of any chili pepper capable of producing 1 millions SHUs (Scoville Scale heat units) would become illegal. The government made this decision after noting that after eating extremely hot sauces, people frequently talked about feeling a "high" afterwards.

26-year-old actress Lindsay Lohan tweeted that she was pregnant. She posted the announcement at 10:35 pm (west coast time) on April 1st, which caused confusion because it was already April 2nd on the east coast. Therefore, her followers weren't sure whether or not she was joking. She clarified her intent the following day by tweeting, "April Fools. Where's everyone's sense of humor?" Then she deleted the posts.

— The unofficial rules of April Fools are that jokes are supposed to be sprung before noon. Those who delay their jokes until after noon are themselves considered to be the fools.

Google announced Google Nose ^Beta — allowing people to smell what they searched for online. The company explained that they had leveraged "new and existing technologies to offer the sharpest olfactory experience available," with their "street sense vehicles" roaming far and wide to index millions of different scents, thereby creating the "Google Aromabase" of 15M+ "scentibytes."


The scents were smellable by people at their computers because Google was supposedly able to manipulate the photons coming out of the screen, causing them to intersect with "infrasound waves," thereby temporarily aligning molecules to emulate particular scents.



The hoax recalled the BBC's Smellovision April Fool's Day hoax of 1965, in which the broadcaster claimed to have perfected technology allowing aromas produced in a television studio to be smelled via TV sets in people's homes.

The Huffington Post announced it was introducing a paywall, requiring all employees of the New York Times to purchase a digital subscription in order to view the content on its site. However, anyone who wasn't a New York Times employee would continue to have full and free access. NYT employees would be greeted by the following message when they visited the site:


The Huffington Post added that, "of course, stories that aggregate falsehoods to support an administration's efforts to take the country into a disastrous, decade-long war based on lies will always remain free." Link: Huffington Post.

Popular social news site Reddit changed its layout to resemble that of its rival, Digg. It also rebranded itself "Reddigg". It proclaimed: "At last, change has come to reddit. Let us rejoice."

Computer experts have warned that a computer virus, the Conficker virus, is expected to activate in millions of computers on April 1st. However, exactly what it will do when activated is not known. Despite the date of its expected activation, the virus itself is not a hoax!

Online retailer thinkgeek.com unveiled Squeez Bacon, 100% bacon paste that could be squeezed from a tube. It described it as "the world's most perfect food."

Yahoo! unveiled an "ideological search engine." Users could select between the Democratic and Republican ideology. Democratic results displayed in blue. Republican in red.

The website of Cyclone Dairy appeared online in late March 2009. It purported to represent "the first dairy brand to offer great-tasting products made exclusively from cloned cows." Its tagline was "Quality. Consistency. Isn't that what your family deserves?" The smiling family featured on the site's front page included a young boy missing his front teeth.
On April 1st ice cream-maker Ben & Jerry's revealed it had created the site, hoping to raise "onsumer awareness of the government's recent approval of cloned milk and meat within the human food supply chain."

YouTube flipped its videos upside-down. The effect displayed for visitors who opened the home page and then went to a video from there. It was also possible to activate the effect by adding the code &flip=1 to the end of a youtube URL. YouTube wrote that it had introduced the new format because, "Our internal tests have shown that modern computer monitors give a higher quality picture when flipped upside down—kind of like how it's best to rotate your mattress every six months." To see the new format, it advised viewers to either 1) Turn your monitor upside-down; 2) Tilt your head to the side; or 3) Move to Australia.

The website smellr debuted, describing itself as "like Flickr, but for your nose":

Google unveiled Gmail Autopilot, a feature that automatically reads and responds to your email, saving you the time of doing this. It boasted that Autopilot could mirror any communication style, could also work for Gmail chat, and would work even if both sender and recipient had Autopilot on:

YouTube UK and Australia "rickrolled" their visitors, rickrolling being a popular bait-and-switch-style prank in which people are baited into clicking on a link that sends them to a video of 1980s pop singer Rick Astley singing his hit Never Gonna Give You Up. All the "featured video" links on YouTube's front page sent people to a rickroll page set up by YouTube under the user name YTRickRollsYou. Over 7 million people were rickrolled by the site. (YouTube is owned by Google.)

A news article, supposedly from a Scottish paper, circulated online, claiming that a crocodile had been sighted in Loch Ness. The article read, in part:

Google announced a new technology called TiSP (Toilet Internet Service Provider) that would allow it to provide free in-home wireless broadband service. Users would connect to the internet via their bathroom's plumbing system. Installation involved dropping a weighted fiber-optic cable down the toilet and then activating the "patented GFlush™ system" which would send the cable "surfing through the plumbing system to one of the thousands of TiSP Access Nodes." Google promised that it would provide a higher-performance version of the service for businesses which would include "24-hour, on-site technical support in the event of backup problems, brownouts and data wipes."