April Fool’s Day is upon us. Over the past few years, it’s become more and more common for customer-focused companies—including some of our favorites—to get in on the act.
While a story from USA Today warns of the potential dangers of office pranks on April Fool’s Day—drawing the ire of your boss, in particular—there is no warning on the potential fallout from pranking your customers.
For the perennial pranksters at ThinkGeek, some of their best gags have become rather profitable. For instance, in 2009, the site featured a Star Wars-themed Taun Taun sleeping bag. Well, truth and science fiction soon became one as demand for this goofball product led ThinkGeek to actually produce the sleeping bag. Ever since, customers have been gobbling them up at $99-a-pop.
Just for kicks, here’s a round up of some notable consumer-based April Fool’s Day gags for 2013.
- C’est la vie, YouTube: Unbeknownst to most of us, it turns out YouTube has been nothing more than a lengthy contest to find the best video in the world. After eight years, the contest will come to a close tomorrow at midnight. Be sure to download your favorites as they will all soon be deleted. It turns out that YouTube was just a big contest. According to the YouTube blog, the site, which was launched in 2005, was just a way to find the best video in the world. And today, eight years later, it is closing the competition. The site will stop taking submissions on Tuesday, April 2 at midnight and close down. All videos will be deleted.
- A solution for shorter Tweets: With just 140 characters at your disposal, vowels can really get in the way of successful microblogging. With Twttr, the new free tier of Twitter service, this won’t be a problem. Don’t fret, though. For just $5/month, you can keep your vowels if you’re quite attached to them.
- Smell-O-Vision+: Google Nose, the new “scentsation†from Google now allows users to incorporate smell into their searchers. With a 15 million scentibyte smell database, there’s a great chance you’ll smell your way to successful searching.
- The e-mail Blues? Gmail Blue is just like Gmail, only bluer.
- Bacon flavored mouth wash: The ongoing bacon craze seemed to have peaked a few years ago, but Scope isn’t ready to give up the goods. Encouraging you to “Indulge your meat tooth,†Scope announced its new bacon-flavored mouthwash. Yuck.
- Feline Tech? Sony imagines a world where dogs, cats and hamsters can get in on the latest tech trends with its Animalia line of products, including a doggie TV and M3-OW KittyCans cat headphones.
- Can-o-Pizza: Domino’s Pizza Japan announced a not-so-delicious pizza-in-a-can product for April Fool’s Day in Japan.
Enjoy the day, folks. And stay on your guard…you never know who’s in on the pranks today.