April Fool gags click in cyberspace!

Priya Padmanabhan

BANGALORE: “This year, Infosys plans to gift $1 million, a Toshiba notebook, and a foreign trip to all its employees on completing 25 years of existence!"

This snippet of information, which was posted on Wikipedia until a few days ago, has been doing the rounds through email forwards.

The posting, which may have been an April fool's day prank, has been removed from Wikipedia. An Infosys spokesperson laughed away the rather generous claim saying, "Its not true. We keep having rumors like this all the time."

Now, it looks like someone at Wikipedia also woke up to the rumor. A search for Infosys on Wikipedia now throws up this message: "As a result of recent vandalism, editing of this page by new or unregistered users is temporarily disabled. Changes can be discussed on the talk page, or you can request unprotection."

While on the topic of April Fool's gags, search company Google which has been launching new products and services regularly, announced Google Romance, a heart-warming new service for singles ready to mingle on All Fool's Day.

The company even issued a press release that said: “Google Romance is a new product that offers users both a psychographic matchmaking service and all-expenses-paid dates for couples who agree to experience contextually relevant advertising throughout the course of their evening.”

The new service even had an appropriate tagline that said: "When you think about it, love is just another search problem." The beta release is still available at http://www.google.com/romance/. Unsuspecting, love-hungry users realized the hoax when they tried to post their profile.

Google had a hearty laugh over the hoax and said, “Romance Not Found!”

OpenOffice had a shocker of an announcement on April 1st. It claimed that Bill Gates had bought OpenOffice in a deal worth billions of dollars.

The reason for Gates' decision: “He was sick and tired of open-source eating away at his profits, and so the world's richest man decided to put an end to the nuisance and simply buy OpenOffice.org.”

Who says techies lack a sense of humour?

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