The April Fool is dead.
Or at least the gentle jester of the common folk has metastised into a corporate colossus controlled by global marketing executives, bestriding the internet to force familiar brands ever deeper into the collective consciousness.
So while Google extended a tradition dating back, well, a decade or so, in poking fun at its own ubiquity – introducing a database of smells and shutting down its YouTube service – it was fitting that old-fashioned, paper-based media poked fun yesterday at the power of machines over our minds.
In Britain, where newspapers have long relished the ancient art of goading the gullible on April 1, the Guardian offered its leftish, liberal readers “augmented reality” spectacles to let them “see the world through the Guardian’s eyes at all times”.
By staring at a restaurant, cinema or retail product and the paper’s critics’ reviews would come into vision without all the hassle of reaching for the phone, wrote the Guardian’s anagrammatic correspondent Lois P. Farlo. And “anti-bigotry technology” would screen out offending op-ed columns should any reader happen to pick up a copy of the right-wing Daily Mail.
Fantasy meets reality, however, with a payoff line noting the imminent appearance in stores of Google Glass, which lets wearers view information in front of their eyes and take video.
Google itself, which has championed the art of April Fools Day marketing, offered visitors to its google.com search engine a beta-version of a new technology, Google Nose – “the new scent-sation in search”, a kind of olfactory world wide web.
In a corporation-wide push for the global funny-bone, the company also offered gags on its Gmail e-mail service – poking fun at innovation with a video explaining new, Gmail Blue would be... blue; Google Maps offered a treasure hunting mode and old parchment-style navigation; and Google’s You Tube unit “revealed” that the video-sharing site had all along been a giant contest and would now shut down to judge the winner.
New products and services were fair game for other brands keen to show their lighter side: Japanese telecoms company KDDI offered a mobile phone that was actually a bed – to save ever having to get up; a blog at Twitter, or rather “twttr”, said users who wanted vowels in their microblogs would have to pay.
German carmaker BMW offered British readers excited at the impending arrival of a royal baby the P.R.A.M. (Postnatal Royal Auto Mobile) complete with picture of a sportily styled buggy and corgis at Windsor Castle – inquiries to Joe.King@bmw.co.uk.
In the more traditional realm of news-based fun, Yahoo’s French website led its front page with the announcement that, to save money, President Francois Hollande would move his offices from the Elysée Palace to one of Paris’s grittier suburbs.