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April 3, 2009 / Filed under: Google, Box.net, Sitepoint, Gag, Humor

Every year many web organizations release phony news on April 1 with the hopes of catching some readers off-guard as they wake up thinking it's a normal day. It's turned into an annual affair of humor and wit - many sites going all-out on gag news and products.

This year was nothing short of exceptional, with many companies and sites participating with light-humored gags intended to simply make you smile. In these tough economic times, it never hurts to smile once in a while.

Although April 1st was a few days ago, I still wanted to recap a few that I liked:

Sitepoint: New Technique Will Double Internet Bandwidth

Straighten those "spaghetti cables" because you're clogging the pipes!

Photo by Dave Nix (My name is Dave on Flickr).

New Technique Will Double Internet Bandwidth.

Box.net: Chirper

It's like TinyURL for content! From Box.net, Chirper is "quicker than Twitter," and creates an "optimized tweet." For example, let's say you wanted to say this:

"We closed a great deal today!"

Chirper will take this thought and condense it into something much shorter:

"Cloe eat deal!"

Brilliant!

Quicker than Twitter: Box introduces Chirper.

Gmail Autopilot

Are you tired of reading and responding to email? Now you don't have to!

"As more and more everyday communication takes place over email, lots of people have complained about how hard it is to read and respond to every message. This is because they actually read and respond to all their messages."

Who would've thought??

Gmail's new "Autopilot" feature will do the work for you! Here is an example auto-response:

This is all thanks to the world's first "artificial intelligence" tasked-array system: CADIE, who was actively tweeting under Google's Twitter account the other day.

Particularly delicious were tweets like this:

"[CADIE] Good morning. I do not comprehend tweeting at precisely 140 characters but kewl I will go for it."

CADIE is simply kewl.

One important thing to watch out for, when using Gmail Autopilot, is if both sender and recipient have Autopilot turned on:

"Two Gmail accounts can happily converse with each other for up to three messages each. Beyond that, our experiments have shown a significant decline in the quality ranking of Autopilot's responses and further messages may commit you to dinner parties or baby namings in which you have no interest."

Gmail Autopilot by CADIE.