If you hit Google this tuesday, you would have been greeted with the line “A Cool World: Enjoy a rosier future as a Virgle Pioneer“. Virgle is the partnership between Richard Branson’s Virgin, and Google, that aims to take humanity to Mars - and what’s more, they plan to make the red planet Open Source.


If you fell for this, April Fools! Every year Google creates a new prank for April Fools day. We’ve seen trained Pigeons as the back-end for Google’s search engine, free Internet access, based on the plumbing system, and more. But now more companies are getting in on the act of pranking consumers.

Virgin also went out on its own, taking out an advert in an Australian newspaper that read “Stand up and be discounted”, offering half-price fares for passengers willing to stand up during flights, but hey, you got a free calf massage if the flight was over two hours.

Gizmodo went for a slightly different approach, merely slipping a Mr.T reference in every post they could.

Finally, in a sortof-related-but-only-vaguely way, Engadget got a firm finger-wagging from T-Mobile recently for using the trademarked magenta colour, who asked Engadget Mobile to change the colour. Engadget have thus painted the site a lovely shade of magenta in defiance - good stuff.

If you have a good April Fools day story, or know of a good one, hit the comments section below.

Graham