Your not supposed to believe everything you read on the internet, but on April Fools you can't even trust news worthy sites like Slashdot and it's down right annoying.

I wouldn't normally complain but I got burned twice today.

The worst offence was when Andy linked to a new Foo Fighters' single, "In Your Honor" posted at stereogum.com. I fell hard thinking this was a really going to be a new song. Turns out to total prank with a horrible song to boot (I have no idea who the real artist is). I was all excited as I downloaded it, labeled it, and sorted the MP3 into my music/artist folder, then when I loaded it up it was utter crap, and after 10 seconds of disbelief it hit me that I had been played.

My second burn was no where near as bad, but Fark linked to Nasa's astronomy photo of the day which boasted of Water on Mars, and yes I thought this was plausible. Luckily this was funny enough that it didn't hurt so bad that I was once again played as a fool.

A mini burn was on Slashdot when a story reported that Microsoft was porting SQL Server to other operating systems. This seemed likely enough, there could be a large market for MS if they supported operating systems that are more popular in the server market. But luckily the brief of the article mentioned that the Xbox was also going to run SQL Server and saved me from wasting my time and following the news story any further.

Aside from being burned I just hated see all fake stories crowding up the sites I visit regularly. Here are some totally ridiculous ones:

• Encyclopaedia Britannica takeover of Wikimedia [via]
• EU to Ban Macs [via]
  Note: I almost thought this was going to be real because I knew Apple had once been told that they aren't allowed to claim they have the fastest computer, but this is totally unrelated to that.
• John woo to direct Katamari Damacy movie [via]
• Yahoo! and Google merge (forming YaGoohoo!gle) [via]
  Note: This is actually kinda cool.

The pranks were not limited to web sites alone. When logging into Steam to play Counter-Strike:Source the in game a news window popped up with an update of supposed changes made to the game to make it more realistic. The April Fools change log can be found posted on Steam's web site here.

I did however enjoy some great pranks pulled by Google and ThinkGeek which annually do something for April 1^st and you can basically assume they have something up their sleeves.

• Google Gulp - a line of "smart drinks" designed to maximize your surfing efficiency by making you more intelligent, and less thirsty. [via]
  Note: Check out the extensive FAQ, and last year Google was hiring people to work on the moon.
• iCopulate - Apple iPod accessory to transfer files directly between 2 iPods. [via]
  Note: Last year ThinkGeek was selling an Infinite Power Generator that gathered energy from the atmosphere.

Then on top of all this, some real things happened today:

• Google's Gmail gets some new features [via]
  Note: Now with fancy HTML formatting for outgoing e-mail and 2GB of storage. With a commitment to provide as much storage as it's users need.
• Google Ride Finder [via]
  Note: Google's tracking Taxis in 11 different US cities via GPS and then displaying their location on Google Maps.

If you want to see all the pranks recorded on the web today, check out the huge list available at urgo.org [via].