'Financial Fools Day'

Image by Matthew Anderson via Flickr

April Fools Day provided the usual web deceit and anarchy although it will be the real world that grabs all the headlines in the newspapers tomorrow.

This morning I used Facebook to inform friends that my partner was pregnant by updating her status whilst she was asleep. When she realised what had occurred she wasn't too impressed and several people had contacted us both by then which made me laugh!

Michael Arrington from TechCrunch has provided a summary of many of the pranks from around the Web, including humour from Amazon, YouTube, Reddit with a redesign identical to Digg and of course Google who provided us with Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity (CADIE), a 3D version of Chrome since “81% of households had red/blue 3D glasses lying around” and my favourite GMail which now has Autopilot -

As more and more everyday communication takes place over email, lots of people have complained about how hard it is to read and respond to every message. This is because they actually read and respond to all their messages.

Across London throughout the day there were protests against the G20 summit and working near Old Street police station I could hear the increased police activity. As with any protest there are a minority who feel that violence and vandalism are acts that compliment their cause but instead they compound it. Obviously they have their reasons, grievances and unfortunately retaliate when provoked but a peaceful protest is remembered where violence is better forgotten.

As appears to be the normality now with these events that require minute-by-minute coverage and live blogging, Twitter again emerged as the main service to distribute news, updates and pictures. I was impressed with the Sky News coverage as they had three reporters tweeting and uploading pictures from the crowds. So much traffic was generated from users uploading to the Twitpic service that it collapsed several times due to the sheer volume of images being shared.

I find it impressive that everyone has now become a reporter, status updates have evolved to break news and provide hands-on perspective. What these protesters want is a voice and a chance to be heard, through Twitter they have that voice and their message is being relayed for everyone to read. What's are you doing?

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