April

Eric Litman from WashingtonVC joins us to talk crap on idiotic startup founders, we invent a new social network for plants and apparently elephants can paint portraits, no joke. Oh, and by the way, your April Fools' joke isn't that funny.

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The word of the day is "prank." Unless maybe you're one of the ones who got taken in hook, line, and sinker, in which case it's "doh!"

If you haven't already noticed, today is April Fools' Day, but you probably have, since most pranksters seem to get an early start. No single April 1 hoax may have the heft of Orson Welles' War of the Worlds stunt the night before Halloween in 1938, and there aren't usually chores involved like the ritual post-Halloween clean-up of splattered egg whites, but nothing comes close … Read more

UPDATE: Gossip blog Valleywag decided to out this for what it is--an April Fool's joke. Oh, well, it would've been funny to see people pick up on it.

With the rise of "microblogging" services like Twitter that limit the number of characters in a post, URL-shortening sites like TinyURL and URLtea have taken off. A new service that just launched, Urlrurl, promises to step it up a notch by tracking the popularity of online memes that are tossed around the Web through viral link-sharing.

"Urlrurl.com stands out from other link shortening services because of its patented Relay-Stick algorithm," a release from the new start-up read, "which dives into the links put through its shortener and exposes common memes across the pages people are clicking on." That sounds pretty cool. It's also connected to the Twitter API, plugging it into one of the biggest pools of URL-shortening activity on the Web.

And there's more: "In early June, a free stats program will launch, as well as a premium service for bloggers and publishers," the release continued. "The premium service will allow publishers to register their site with Urlrurl.com and receive deep insight into how content and memes have traversed the web." Considering that no one can really tell where Internet memes emerge these days--4Chan, Fark, Digg, iVillage--this kind of service, provided it actually works, could give some interesting and oft-hilarious insights.

Urlrurl is headquartered in New York with development offices in China, and counts TechCrunch czar Michael Arrington among its angel investors.… Read more

It was bound to happen. After years of decline and the steadily rising tide of iTunes, Napster, Rhapsody, et al--CD numbers are now in free fall--and the LP has finally regained its position as the world's most popular physical music format! Boosted by sales of Radiohead's "In Rainbows," and Amy Winehouse's "Back to Black," LP sales edged past the CD a few weeks ago. Elvis Costello's upcoming release, "Momofuku," will only be offered as a hi-fi LP or low-fi download. The CD is on its way out.

The Compact Disc … Read more

Happy April Fools' Day!

As expected, Google's Gmail rolled out a fake "custom time" feature, which purports to let users send e-mails into the past and consequently never miss important deadlines again. The new feature "utilizes an e-flux capacitor to resolve issues of causality," Google wrote.

"I just got two tickets to Radiohead by being the 'first' to respond to a co-worker's 'first-come, first-serve' email," a fake testimonial on the Custom Time site read. "Someone else had already won them, but I told everyone to check their inboxes again. Everyone sort … Read more

In a surprise move that has shocked Silicon Valley, young Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg will guest host an upcoming episode of Saturday Night Live, according to multiple sources.

The mild-mannered Zuckerberg, best-known for vanilla-flavored speeches filled with talking points about "the social graph" and "making communication more efficient," will provide the opening monologue as well as appear in a number of sketches on the NBC show's April 5 episode.

Appearing on the sketch comedy show is something Zuckerberg has wanted to do for a long time, a close friend confided to CNET News.com. "… Read more

UPDATE 4:10 a.m. PDT April 1: It's up! Check out Gmail custom time to see how Google uses an "e-flux capacitor to resolve issues of causality."

It looks like we are getting a preview of Google's April Fools' joke for Gmail a little early. Google put the link in the screenshot above on everyone's Gmail page. As of right now, the link only takes you to a 404 error screen, but presumably Google will post its joke in the near future.

It seems strange that Google would push a dead link to all … Read more

Don't click on that silly April Fools' Day e-mail, says one security expert.

In a blog, Arbor Networks' Jose Nazario reports that within the last 24 hours he's seeing new releases of the Storm worm designed to take advantage of the first day of April. This new spam campaign is a lure to infect new computers that will become part of the larger Storm worm botnet.

The e-mail body is spartan: the words "Doh! April Fools" followed by a numeric URL. If a user clicks on that URL, the default Internet browser will open to a … Read more

We almost didn't post this item because we wanted to keep it a secret from our co-workers. That way we could use it on them every day between now and April 1.

The "Phantom Keystroker" is the ultimate prank for office sadist, a devious little device that's sure to make any cubicle dweller go postal (not that it takes much). Once discreetly plugged into an unsuspecting colleague's USB port, it will randomly move the cursor around and type in dummy text whenver it feels like it, Gizmodo says.

Unfortunately it can't be controlled remotely. … Read more