Seen so far...

[ewx]

• submerged rising bollards at Jesus Lock
• RFD: Ostracism Procedures within the UK Hierarchy
• Google Copernicus Center is hiring
• IIRC Altavista really did something like this internally. This is highest in the "might just be for real" list, I think.
• LJ userinfo has acquired some variant text

There's a joke RFC too, but it's lame. Ananova reports some legacy-media April fools, as does Yahoo.

Updates:

• SHEF
• Bluetooth Brush
• Mandelson emerges as new frontrunner to chair BBC (link from beingjdc)
• PC HabiCase® (from megamole)

Comments

[emperor]

The gmail thing says "and it turns annoying spam e-mail messages into the equivalent of canned meat.", which suggests a joke to me (as does the idea of letting everyong have 1GB of space :)

[megamole.livejournal.com]

However, talk to an acquaintance of mine within Google suggests that this might just be real.

[pseudomonas.livejournal.com]

It just doesn't seem funny enough to be April Fools.

[pseudomonas.livejournal.com]

Mm, the BBC is reporting this story (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/3588933.stm) with a straight face.

[gerald_duck]

The Google mail thing seems entirely plausible to me. Given they're using commodity hardware, the mail is probably going to be on IDE discs. If you buy in bulk, do a bit of RAID striping, and anticipate people not reaching anything like their 1GB quota for, say, three years, I reckon it'll cost them 10-20p per user to implement.

And they place advertisements in the user interface that relate to words found in the text of your e-mails. How quickly could they earn 20p from advertisers for doing that, I wonder?

Actually, I'm not totally convinced Clive Feather's ostracism proposal is a spoof, either. Especially since it was dated yesterday, not today.

The variant LJ userinfo text only shows up if you use their new interface, by the way. Since I use the trad. interface, I had to fire up a separate browser that didn't have my preferences cookie to see it.

dated yesterday

[ewx.livejournal.com]

The "Date" field in the HTML version is completely broken. The real Date field is thus:

Date: Thu, 1 Apr 2004 00:00:01 +0100 (BST)

[imc.livejournal.com]

The variant LJ userinfo text only shows up if you use their new interface

Oh, right… I thought the `variant text' just referred to the extra entry in Friends-Of. Interestingly, the new user doesn't show up in Joule (http://marnanel.org/joule?user=imc).

[tienelle.livejournal.com]

I find it amusing that lj_serialadder's Friends page is empty.

[lnr]

new interface: ah, that explains why I was wondering what people were on about the.

[lnr]

I still can't spot any difference.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

screenshot (http://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/junk/stalk.png)

[lnr]

Ah, they must have fixed it perhaps at midday, since it certainly doens't look like that if I log off.

[imc.livejournal.com]

It still says that here (using a fresh copy of Lynx, for example).

[lnr]

I need to tell the login options to expire when browser closes and actually quit in order to get the relevant cookie to go away. And then when I log in again I get a new one, so it disappears again. Side effect of automagically accepting all cookies I guess.

[sparrowsion]

<confused> -- I've been seeing it with the old interface.

[imc.livejournal.com]

There are two things to see: one, namely, the user lj_serialadder in your Friend-of list, is noticeable in both versions. The other, viz., the renaming of Friends and Friends-of to Stalking and Stalked-by, is only visible using the XColibur skin (because it was presumably done by editing the definition of that skin).

However, the latter has just now been changed back.

[sparrowsion]

But I was seeing Stalking and Stalked-by in Dystopia. Really, I'm not imagining it.

[imc.livejournal.com]

OK, you're not mad.

Apparently it's that they didn't change the UK-English version, not that they didn't change the Dystopia skin.

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

The Independent story quoted on Ananova was also on Today this morning, with comments from the Indie's media chappie. Obviously a well-planned collaboration.

[beingjdc.livejournal.com]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/guardianpolitics/story/0,3605,1183184,00.html

[imc.livejournal.com]

From the Ananova link:

The Sun reckons Thames Valley police are fitting hawks with cameras in an effort to catch speeding drivers in Oxfordshire. It says the birds will swoop on drivers who have been spotted by their handlers.

Well we did see signs all along the I-95 in Virginia saying "speed limit enforced by aircraft"…

[lusercop.livejournal.com]

The guardian story about mandelson doesn't have anything obvious to indicate that it's an April Fool. I mean, I hope it is, but what have I missed?

[addedentry.livejournal.com]

Thanks for this!

Apparently the Telegraph reported a study from a Professor O'Lali about increasing morale at work, including inviting employees to enter the office backwards on Monday morning to make them feel as happy as they do leaving on Friday. (Can't find it online, but it might have been removed at midday along with The Guardian's April fool.)

Ha ha, only serious

[gerald_duck]

You know, I can see the HabiCase idea taking off for real, just so long as the rest of the system isn't too noisy for pets…

Re: Ha ha, only serious

[ewx.livejournal.com]

I think there'd be a bit of a risk of roasted (or at least badly dehydrated) hamsters...

[ghoti.livejournal.com]

My favourite is still the one from several years ago, when Radio 1 and Radio 2 switched output for the entire morning (except for jingles)

[sphyg.livejournal.com]

There's a difference? ;P I liked the Tyrannosaurus rex genome project from last year. Bah, they've taken the page down but there's a copy here (http://www.lecb.ncifcrf.gov/~toms/paper/ev/trex/).