After my recent posts on the atrocious ‘R’ word..I thought all my readers could use some laughs.

April Fools Day has always provided a license to the media to print and broadcast bizarre and fanciful tales.  From television revealing that spaghetti grows on trees, to advertisements for the left-handed burger, the tradition of April Fool’s Day stories in the media has a weird and wacky history.

This year more than ever social media has followed in the footsteps of its conventional cousin. Here are some of the best..

Youtube’s ‘Country Filter’ has resulted in UK viewers getting Australian settings all videos they view, resulting in inversion of clips and text.

GMail has introduced an autoresponder that reads and responds to your e-mail so you don’t have to.  The problems kick in when two parties both turn it on “two Gmail accounts can happily converse with each other for up to three messages each. Beyond that, our experiments have shown a significant decline in the quality ranking of Autopilot’s responses.”

Labour MP Tom Harris backs a blogging counter terrorism bill “from April 2010, every British blogger will have to submit each post for official approval”.

The Guardian will publish its content exclusively on twitter consigning the print editions to the footnotes of history.   The Guardian and Twitter will also launch Gutter, a service designed to “filter noteworthy liberal opinion from the cacophony of Twitter updates”.

….Oh and the entire internet is being rebooted.

Press F13 on your keyboard to access a complete list of the best social web April Fools pranks