YouTube Travels Back in Time to 1911 for April Fool's Day
YouTube Travels Back in Time to 1911 for April Fool's Day
Posted 04/01/2011 at 6:50am
| by Paul Lilly
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While several sites and companies try to outright prank visitors with fake news stories and bogus announcements, YouTube's taking a bit of a different approach. In a bit of a roleplay scenario, YouTube is pretending to celebrate 100 years on the Web with a look back at what the video sharing site would have been like in 1911. Say what?
"It’s hard to believe that just a century ago, YouTube was a fledgling video site for paupers and presidents alike. Today, we celebrate 100 years of YouTube, and we thought we would reflect on our inaugural year with a re-print of our first blog post from 1911," YouTube states in a blog post. "In honor of this milestone, today’s homepage is a reproduction of how you might have viewed it 100 years ago. Check out some of the most popular videos of the time and be sure to try out our new upload mode which summons a horse-drawn carriage to pick up your video submission from your home. Here’s to another epoch of great video!"
You'll find lots of sepia tones, old school video reels, and piano soundtracks as part of the makeover, as well as a humorous "Top 5 Viral Pictures of 1911" video.
Google, which owns YouTube, has a history of capitalizing on April Fool's Day with quirky announcements. This year, one of those is Gmail Motion, a spoof on all the motion controlled technologies as of late. You can check it out here.
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ShyLinuxGuy
April 01, 2011 at 3:38pm
I think someone, somewhere will watch this--and believe--that Youtube really existed in 1911.
When I get time to watch it, I'll probably be laughing because someone, somewhere, is actually going to fall for it.Not because of the video itself.
ot: I just dealt with someone a few days ago, someone in his 70s that thought the Internet was "in" their computer. The place I work sells Clearwire service too, so I had to explain, in very simplified terms, what the Internet was and how to connect to it and that it wasn't "in" his computer. It was way over his head, and the ~$1000 laptop he brought with him (he was DEFINITELY cheated out of his money probably by a Worst Buy salesperson) was suddenly of no use to him because he just got it and he didn't even know how to turn it off...seriously...He wanted to do the Skype chats with his kids and grandkids who are kind of far. I hope he gives it another chance, I just think he was just very frustrated and expected to know everything at once.
I feel sorry for people who are very computer illiterate. They're missing out.
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