Yesterday was April Fools day, a fun day where everyone lies and pulls pranks on each other. April Fools isn’t really celebrated in Africa, but I figured, what the heck. The world is Flat now, right? Everything for everyone! I had no idea how many people would actually believe yesterday’s posts “Under Sea Cable Arrives in Africa” and “Google South Africa to Open Theme Park“. Both posts went viral and drew a lot of serious emails and discussion before some realized we were only joking. No one seemed suspicious of my made up company, Orange-Kumquat-Banana Telecom or that I’d written that Mark Shuttleworth had phoned me from space. This prank was perhaps exasperated when Loy at StartupsNigeria.com built on it with an even more believable post. The epic AfriFAIL though, was all the people who were convinced that Google was actually opening a Theme Park in South Africa, complete with rides like Python 3D and Bash The Balding Ballmer. Well, first we’d like to apologize if either post got your hopes up but it was all in good fun and as a rule, before you believe anything on the Internet, make sure you double check the date!
Beware the ides of April!
Some of the other cool pranks from yesterday included Reddit’s becoming Reddigg by redesigning their entire site to look like competitor Digg.com’s, Google creating an auto-pilot for replying to emails, YouTube played all it’s videos upside down, Opera’s face controlled web browser, Amazon’s use of the double entendre for cloud services hosted on blimps (lol), and finally the one that made more journalists cry than laugh, the UK paper Guardian said was becoming a Twitter only publication because “Experts say any story can be told in 140 characters.”
About the author: Jonathan Gosier is a software developer, writer and social entrepreneur. He currently lives in Kampala, Uganda where he incubates and invests in East African entrepreneurs as the CEO of Appfrica Labs. He's also a TED Fellow.
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April Fools!
Yesterday was April Fools day, a fun day where everyone lies and pulls pranks on each other. April Fools isn’t really celebrated in Africa, but I figured, what the heck. The world is Flat now, right? Everything for everyone! I had no idea how many people would actually believe yesterday’s posts “Under Sea Cable Arrives in Africa” and “Google South Africa to Open Theme Park“. Both posts went viral and drew a lot of serious emails and discussion before some realized we were only joking. No one seemed suspicious of my made up company, Orange-Kumquat-Banana Telecom or that I’d written that Mark Shuttleworth had phoned me from space. This prank was perhaps exasperated when Loy at StartupsNigeria.com built on it with an even more believable post. The epic AfriFAIL though, was all the people who were convinced that Google was actually opening a Theme Park in South Africa, complete with rides like Python 3D and Bash The Balding Ballmer. Well, first we’d like to apologize if either post got your hopes up but it was all in good fun and as a rule, before you believe anything on the Internet, make sure you double check the date!
Beware the ides of April!
Some of the other cool pranks from yesterday included Reddit’s becoming Reddigg by redesigning their entire site to look like competitor Digg.com’s, Google creating an auto-pilot for replying to emails, YouTube played all it’s videos upside down, Opera’s face controlled web browser, Amazon’s use of the double entendre for cloud services hosted on blimps (lol), and finally the one that made more journalists cry than laugh, the UK paper Guardian said was becoming a Twitter only publication because “Experts say any story can be told in 140 characters.”