Bracing for April Fools Day #aprilfool

As I write this it’s less than an hour until April Fools’ Day starts here in Sydney, Australia. I’m actually looking forward to the inevitable batch of lame jokes. Everyone knows (well, almost everyone) that anything odd sounding is likely to be a prank, and so the enjoyment is in who can come up with the funniest prank, as opposed to the one that actually fools people.

The days of actually fooling people are over. Or they should be at least.

You see, the problem with April Fools’ Day is that with the instant connectivity of the internet, time-zones no longer mean anything. So whilst it might be April Fools’ Day here, it might not be where you are for another 8 hours. And thus getting ‘fooled’ is just as meaningless as if you were ‘fooled’ in a months time.

#aprilfool

So, here’s an idea. We want to enjoy the jokes, so how about we make it clear to our readers.

Simply flag your prank as an an April Fools’ Day post, and perhaps on Twitter (where the ‘keyword density’ of April Fools tweets is likely to be high) with a hashtag. How about tagging them with #aprilfool

Oh, and to be clear, Rickrolling isn’t funny at the best of times. Rehashing it as an April Fools’ joke is just sad.

If you have some time to kill, check out this list of the Top 100 April Fools’ Day hoaxes.