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April Fools Day Pranks: YouTube, Twitter, Google, Water Aid and The Guardian

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By Stephen Lepitak, -

April 1, 2013 | 4 min read

Happy April Fool's Day everyone - here we take a look at a few of the pranks carried out by the likes of Twitter, Google, The Guardian and Water Aid to play some tricks on the world. We're sure none of you were fooled however. Of course you weren't.

Google - Gmail Blue

Google introduces you to Gmail Blue through a video featuring a number of talking heads explaining that this was the initial concept for Gmail when it initially launched. Only now technology has caught up to finally realise the vision! So how do you realise the challenge of completely redesigning and recreating something while keeping it exactly the same? Well watch the video to find out. It's Gmail - only bluer.

The Guardian - Guardian Goggles

Yes, that's right, The Guardian has a sense of humour. And here we're meant to believe that the newspaper and website has continued its digital first strategy, only this time
through the creation of 'Guardian Goggles' - a pair of web connected, augmented reality enabled specs (sound familiar?), which will allow readers to send a live video of what they are looking at back to a live-stream that pulls out related content from The Guardian website for them to read. The spectacles also include anti-bigotry technology that will automatically block out columns written by the likes of Melanie Phillips or Richard Littlejohn - who knew the Guardian was bitchy too?

Google - YouTube's ready to select a winner

So the truth is out - YouTube was actually just a long running competition and now all the videos uploaded are being judged to decide the best one. Competition Director Tom Liston announces that youtube.com will now longer be accepting entries - oh and wait - every video will now be deleted at midnight. What???? But don't worry - the winner will be announced when the website goes back online in 2023...featuring nothing else but that video. This video is great stuff - made all the better by an appearance by the 'Charlie Bit My Finger' kids. Epic!

Water Aid - A Well for Africa

A very British gag this one from international charity WaterAid with Ground Force stars Charlie Dimmock and Tommy Walsh digging up a well to send to Africa…in the English countryside. The paid introduce the video to highlight the global water crisis around the world, and encourage viewers to do the same and to send their wells to Africa…before destroying their own well, picking up the piece and packaging it in a box labelled ‘Africa’.

Twitter - Twttr

Twitter fans brace yourself - the microblogging platform has figured out how to save you tweeting space while charging you cash at the same time - they're going to charge everyone to use vowels. Wht th fck? For five dollars a month users will be able to use the premium offer of using vowels within their tweets - although advertisers will have the special feature of being able to use expanded tweets at 141 characters each. The service will be rolled out within the next few days. Impressively comedian Joan Rivers is on board for the prank, sending out a vowel-free tweet as part of the accompanying hashtag #nvwls (see pic.)
The blog post making the announcement is almost believable enough. Now let's just hope they never actually decide this is a good idea after all. Meanwhile, check out our own April Fool's prank here.
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