YouTube has a tradition of celebrating April Fools Day as only the the largest worldwide video-sharing community can. Today, YouTube is highlighting the “Top 5 Viral Pictures of 1911.”

The YouTube Blog adds, “Today’s homepage is a reproduction of how you might have viewed it 100 years ago. Check out some of the most popular videos of the time and be sure to try out our new upload mode which summons a horse-drawn carriage to pick up your video submission from your home.”  Read more... (450 words, 1 image, estimated 1:48 mins reading time)

The Wikipedians have been busy today updating all the Google hoaxes they’ve discovered on April Fools Day.

I won’t list them all, but here are a couple that impressed me for their creativity:

Upload and store anything in the cloud with Google Docs: Starting today, you can upload and store anything in Google Docs. Anything!

“For example, do you ever wish you could CTRL+F your house keys or your TV remote? Store your keys, remotes, rail passes, and other objects you commonly lose with Google Docs, and you’ll never have to worry about finding them again.”  Read more... (370 words, 2 images, estimated 1:29 mins reading time)

Okay, so my usually reliable sources weren’t so reliable. No one tipped me off that Google would officially change its name to Topeka or that YouTube would go to text-only mode, or TEXTp, on April 1, 2010. You know, April Fools Day.

Now, I sorta, kinda saw a different kind of company name coming.

On March 27, I mentioned that Topeka, Kansas, had unofficially renamed itself “Google” for a month in my post “Would You Go Swimming with Sharks or Go Jump in a Lake for Google Fiber?” But, I never suspected that Google would swoop in and grab the searches for the term, Topeka, by renaming itself after city at the edge of the Great Plains.  Read more... (365 words, 2 images, estimated 1:28 mins reading time)

Google has a long tradition of perpetrating April Fools’ Day hoaxes. According to my sources, who are located in India where it is already April 1, 2010, one of the April Fools Day pranks to watch out for this year is the announcement that Google real-time search results are powered by Pigeons who’ve been given Red Bull, whose slogan is “it gives you wings.”

Google launched its April Fool tradition in 2000 with a new “MentalPlex” search technology that supposedly read the user’s mind to determine what the user wanted to search for, thus eliminating the step of actually typing in the search query.  Read more... (284 words, 2 images, estimated 1:08 mins reading time)