It's the first day of April and that means it's April Fool's, a day of hi-jinks, pranks and general mirth. For journalists it's also a day to closely scrutinise every news story that comes your way to check if it's real, and possibly come up with a story of your own to see if you can pull one over on your readers, at least for a second.

We had a look around the internet to see what people had come up with and these are the ones we found.

In our opinion, the best prank of the day was the Guardian's announcement that it is planning to give up print all together in favour of solely using Twitter to report the news. Not only will all new stories have to be written up in 140 characters or less, but the entire archive is being twitterfied as well - with events such as World War Two condensed to "OMG Hitler invades Poland, allies declare war see tinyurl.com/b5x6e for more" and the assassination of JFK reduced to "JFK assassin8d @ Dallas, def. heard second gunshot from grassy knoll WTF?"

According to the Telegraph, harnessing the power of swimming fish could be key to generating electricity for UK homes. Citing government scientists at the Environment Agency's Horizon Scanning Team, the new realm of Finetics could solve energy crisis woes.

Online video site YouTube managed to cause confusion among viewers when for a few hours, all videos were flipped upside down.

Chip maker Qualcomm went the whole nine yards, with its behind the scenes video of its work into genetic splicing in an attempt to expand network coverage.

Multimedia toasters were the pick of the day for both the BBC and Symbian. The Beeb unveiled the iPlayer Toaster, complete with the option to burn the iPlayer play button logo into the toast using a new HD (High Darkness) rendering mode and the Digital Retraction Mechanism (DRM), which automatically withdraws and shreds any uneaten toast after 7 days. While Symbian 'launched' an open source Wi-Fi enabled Toaster complete with a touch screen and BreadSense technology that uses internal sensors to figure out the ideal heat setting and time for the bread you have inserted.

For the die-hard trumpet and Lederhosen fans out there, Xbox announced plans to release Alpine Legend from Snowy Top products, complete with a special goat edition to help you yodel along to classics like 'Whose spit is in my horn?' and 'More goat bell (It needs)'.

For those who prefer to get out and about rather than sit at home and play video games, how about a budget trip to Mars for just $99, $3tn off the normal price courtesy of travel site Expedia?

Google had a few different pranks on the go, all around its Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity (Cadie), an artificial intelligence recently launched by the search giant, which has already created its own blog. Just in case Cadie is not an April Fool, I for one welcome our new open source overlord.

According to Google, Cadie was used to help create a 3D version of Chrome (complete with printable 3D glasses) and new brain search tool for mobiles that helps you remember things by indexing the content of your brain to make it searchable

Another browser-based April Fool joke came from Opera, who revealed Face Gestures, allowing web surfers to interface with the browser using winks and other facial distortions. There is even an instructional video attached.

Mobile Crunch got the inside scoop on the Palm Post, and following the network sharing deal between O2 and Vodafone, Mobile News got wind of a new split screen twin phone to be launched jointly by the two operators.

Gadget sites Firebox and I Want One Of Those (Iwoot) both had a few spoof entries of their own.

Firebox had its Satnav trainers, powdered beer, an iREMember Dream Recorder and the P**s up in a Brewery Experience. While Iwoot was advertising a new holo-screen and memory stick that can extract and record your actual memories.

A few spoof press releases to hit our inbox included meeting organisers Doodle, claiming that all G20 meetings were being scheduled via its service, and UK job search engine 1Job saying it was going to buy Google - oddly enough the latter release didn't mention the price of the purchase.

That's all we've been able to find over the course of the day, but if there are any more around that we've missed, be sure to let us know.

01 Apr 2009