April fools this year brought some real fun and a little disappointment to the users of the web. Google announced they were changing their company name to “Topeka” and Youtube announced a new, bandwidth saving video format, Textp.

Google: “Official Name Change”

Early in March, 2010, the mayor of Topeka signed a proclamation that for the duration of the month, the town would be known as “Google”. This seemingly outrageous action turns out to be an attempt at promoting the central US state capitol as a central hub of Google’s new lightning fast network testing. In return, Google decided to prank the world by announcing their change of name to “Topeka” in honor of the town changing it’s name to “Google”. Their April fools blog post really didn’t fool many people as the such an announcement really came as a bit over the top although very well executed.

Youtube: Textp saves bandwidth and new design shocks world.

For a moment, Youtube’s “Textp” almost seemed like it could possibly be a real, although slightly silly project. The idea was that “Textp” could be selected instead of High Definition to save Youtube’s monthly bandwidth bill.

Unfortunately, the extremely eye pleasing ACSII text effect rendering was disabled by Youtube at the end of the day causing a huge stir of discontent among users who missed out. To top it off, Youtube released a new site design the same day causing most users to think the over-simplified new look was another April fools joke. With a new style looking like it was made by a novice web developer and an awesome April fools joke which was disabled after only one day, Youtube lost plenty of brownie points with it’s users. Let’s just hope they find a way to earn them back with something groundbreaking.