Monitoring & Analyzing Social Media

5 Greatest April Fools Moments in Social Media

Anyone involved even tangentially in social media has come across the term linkbait - the creation of articles whose sole purpose is to generate traffic, links, and eventually lead to a rise in Google SERPS.  I find that linkbait reaches a point of saturation when themed around specific events - April Fool’s Day is one such event.

At the risk of overwhelming readers with endless links of poorly planned April Fool’s Day jokes and gags, let’s turn out attention to the 5 best April Fool’s Da of the day:

Identi.ca buys Twitter

5 - Buying and being like Twitter.

Identi.ca buys Twitter.  Many of you may not remember Identi.ca - the open source solution to Twitter - when it first came on the scene.  Basically, Identi.ca gained a microblogging market share when Twitter had performance and scalability issues, though it has all but lost its momentum after Twitter stabilized some.  The Guardian claiming that news can be told in 140 characters barely missed being formally included in this list.

NIN Strobe Light

4 - Nine Inch Nails Strobelight.

NIN has previously made press featuring The Slip as a free download if you put in your email.  This time around, if you try putting in your email to get Strobelight, you get the Windows blue screen of death.

Peanut butter jelly time - O RLY?

3 - Weird Digg Popups.

Digg had a disappointing showing last year, showing different symbols when trying to Digg a story, which ended up resulting in performance issues.  They were smarter this year with Internet memes popping up after following a Digg.  I would have ranked this higher had the popups not shown up after every Digg.

The return of Zaibatsu? Nah.

2 - The return of Zaibatsu?

Even though this turned out to be false, it was kind of cool to think that Zaibatsu was back on Digg, even for a moment.  Maybe he’d be quiet on Twitter then. (Chill Reg, we all love ya)

1 - Reddit pwns basically every social media site ever.

As we can see, Reddit has really outdone itself this year.  Reddit is a top tier social news / crowdsourced content site, but today it really took the cake and flexed its creative muscle.

The homepage was skinned to look like Digg, the Science subreddit like Slashdot, Worldnews like whitehouse.gov, etc. You get the idea;  pure awesomeness.