Best April Fools' Day gags, from Roku watches to Colgate dental school
Did you spot all these pranks from April Fools' Day 2014?
Tired of typing? Try the latest feature of Reddit: Headdit.
April Fools' Day: A centuries-old holiday that has become, in the age of the Internet, an opportunity for every Web company under the sun to pull one over on its audience. (Or try to, anyway. We're reasonably certain that not a whole lot of people decided to apply for Pokémon Master at Google, a very fake job position posted this week by the people at Mountain View HQ.)
So what were the most original gags this time around? Well, we're pretty fond of Headdit, a groundbreaking new technology that will allow Redditors of all stripes "to upnod, frownvote and navigate [their] way around reddit" without touching hand to keyboard.
Think: Xbox Kinect meets online message board (and see photo above for some sample actions, including "cat mode").
Meanwhile, thanks to Time, we now know that Colgate University, in New York state, is opening a graduate school of dentistry. And why not? People have been mixing up the toothpaste and the college for ages. "We conducted an incisive review of our curriculum," President Jeffrey Herbst says in a statement, "and we agreed that while we have an extremely strong pre-professional program in the health sciences, there is a gap in our current curriculum."
Lastly, a special nod to the people at Roku, who came up with one of those April Fools' Day gags that – thanks to all the developments in wired wigs and timepieces and spectacles – doesn't seem so far from reality. To wit, meet the Roku Watch, a wrist-mounted video stream platform.
"We know that nearly everyone loves watching TV at home on a big ol’ flat screen," the team at Roku wrote on the company blog. "The Roku Watch is for the rare individuals who enjoy squinting around a teenie tiny screen or like showing off their wearable tech."