Early-bird Pinoys get April Fool’s Day pranks by popular Websites

Early-bird Filipino Web surfers got a taste of pranks by popular websites as part of April Fools' Day fun. While search giant Google and its affiliated sites and even online encyclopedia Wikipedia rolled out their pranks, they returned to normal as of 8 a.m. Friday (Manila time). Predawn visitors to Google's email service Gmail found the email site's home page with weird messages where the vowels were removed.

Gmail's main page was back to normal as of 6 a.m. Friday. But a prank on video-sharing site YouTube, which Google owns, remained online Friday morning, featuring "TEXTp" - a supposed feature where videos would be reduced to a series of letters and numbers. "TEXTp is the result of months of intense transcoding efforts by our engineers, who toiled for weeks to ensure that a large chunk of videos on the platform could be reduced to their most basic elements. By replacing the images in the video with a series of letters and numbers, the videos are far less taxing on our system -- and have the added benefit of promoting literacy!" read an entry by Google's SVP and Chief Financial Officer Patrick Pichette on YouTube's blog site. Even Wikipedia had its own pranks, startling visitors to its news section about a Japanese multinational conglomerate investigating "how some of its customers were accidentally sent back in time to the year 1999." The link led to an article on "ApocalyPS3," where a leap year bug set the internal clocks of Sony PlayStation 3 consoles to December 31, 1999. The prank articles were taken down Wikipedia's site 8 a.m. Friday. On the other hand, tech sites such as PCWorld had their share of hoax articles, including one on how the speed of modern personal computers has caused injuries in the United States. — LGB/RSJ, GMANews.TV