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There’s been a lot written over the past few years about the future of the news industry — how the rise of the web and social media have disrupted it, and how traditional players like the New York Times and others can recover from this disruption and repair their business models by using things like paywalls. But a new manifesto from the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University says that trying to figure out how to repair or rebuild the news industry is a waste of time: the paper’s authors argue that there is no such thing as the “news industry” any more, in any realistic sense, and the sooner both new and existing players get used to that idea the better off everyone will be.

The authors of the Tow report are well known to anyone who pays attention to the future of journalism: Clay Shirky is a journalism professor and author of books like “Here Comes Everybody,” C.W. Anderson is an assistant professor at the College of Staten Island and a frequent commentator on media and cultural theory, and Emily Bell is the former head of digital at The Guardian newspaper and now director of the Tow Center. The paper — which Josh Benton of the Nieman Journalism Lab has done a nice summary of — is a combination of analysis of the current situation, philosophical statements about the nature of the problems facing the industry, and recommendations for how to adapt.

“[This paper] is not, however, about ‘the future of the news industry,’ both because much of that future is already here and because there is no such thing as the news industry any more. There used to be one, held together by the usual things that hold an industry together: similarity of methods among a relatively small and coherent group of businesses, and an inability for anyone outside that group to produce a competitive product. Those conditions no longer hold true.”

Note: This was originally published at Gigaom, where I was a senior writer from 2010 to 2015. The site still exists but the archive is gone.

Continue reading “The Tow Center report”

Facebook’s initial public offering is one of the most eagerly anticipated technology IPOs since Google went public in 2004: It is a launch that values the social network at more than $100 billion, and it has sparked a number of debates about the future of the company, including whether social advertising is effective or not and whether the company is failing to take advantage of mobile properly. But there is another issue investors should be concerned about when they look at Facebook, and it is arguably even more important than any of these operational questions: namely, the iron grip co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has over the shares of the company.

For someone who only just turned 28, Zuckerberg wields an almost unprecedented amount of power over the fate of Facebook — not just over the votes that go along with shares of the company but also over the board of directors. The secret to this tight grip is buried in the history of the social network and in particular in the advice Zuckerberg received from former Napster founder Sean Parker, who was a mentor to the Facebook founder and at one time was president of the social network. The implications of what he helped Zuckerberg construct are profound and create a substantial investment risk.

Sean Parker helped Zuckerberg take control of the company

Long before Facebook became the giant it is today, with almost a billion users and revenue of more than $2 billion, Parker advised its young CEO that he should do everything he could to hang onto control of his company. This advice was based on Parker’s own experiences at Napster and another company called Plaxo, where he was removed by the board. So when Facebook took its initial funding round in 2005, he convinced Zuckerberg to push for control over two seats on the board of directors. And when Parker left the company that same year (after some bad publicity over a drug charge), he gave Zuckerberg his seat as well.

That gave the Facebook CEO control over three of the company’s five board seats. But that was just the beginning: In 2009, the board (which he controls) created a new class of “super-voting” shares that have 10 votes per share, compared with the single vote normal shares have. Through his ownership of a chunk of these super-voting shares, Zuckerberg controls almost 30 percent of the votes in the company. Plus, he has proxy agreements with a number of other shareholders, including co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, that give him control over their shares as well.

In all, these various arrangements give the Facebook CEO control over the board of directors and about 58 percent of the votes in the company. If Zuckerberg decides to do something, he doesn’t even have to ask for permission from the board or put it to a shareholder vote (or if he does the latter, he knows he can prevail). Investors got a tangible example of what this means last month, when Facebook announced it would be acquiring the hot mobile photo-sharing service Instagram for $1 billion. According to a number of reports, Zuckerberg told the board of directors about this billion-dollar deal later — via email.

Super-voting shares are popular, but are they wise?

The visionary founder who controls the progress of the company he founded with an iron fist has become a Silicon Valley archetype, thanks in large part to Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who was famously ejected from the company he co-founded due to his erratic behavior. He returned later to rescue Apple from certain disaster and transform it into one of the most valuable companies in history, giving every startup founder a reason why he too should be allowed to control every aspect of his company, regardless of things like shareholder rights.

Google also helped popularize the idea of multiple-voting shares, which gave co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and former CEO Eric Schmidt effective control over the company. In Google’s offering prospectus when it went public in 2004, the co-founders argued this kind of arrangement was necessary in order to ensure Google remained true to their long-term vision rather than getting sidetracked by questions of short-term financial value.

A number of other tech companies have chosen this same route, including both LinkedIn and Zynga. They have also made the argument that dual-class shares are necessary to protect the company and its vision from the vagaries of the daily stock market. (What many of these companies don’t say is that such structures also make it a lot harder to acquire the company, something that has made multiple-voting shares popular with media companies such as the New York Times and Washington Post.)

Multiple-voting shares are a double-edged sword

So why should investors be wary of multiple-voting shares? Because while they protect the long-term vision of the founders of a company, they can also protect the founders from the kind of shareholder action that is often necessary when a company loses its way. Yahoo and AOL, for example, have both been the target of lobbying efforts by activist shareholders who argue they have been mismanaged and that their share price has been damaged. If either AOL or Yahoo had provisions like Facebook does, there would be no hope of ever changing anything at either company.

As a number of shareholder-rights groups and activists pointed out in advance of Facebook’s IPO, tapping the public markets for funding is supposed to bring with it certain responsibilities on the part of corporate executives — including a duty to be answerable to common shareholders and for any failure to act in the best interests of those investors. If companies don’t want to abide by those rules, the argument goes, they should remain private and seek funding from banks or private venture-capital groups.

In a recent report about Facebook’s voting structure, the activist group Institutional Shareholder Services said the dual-class structure is “an autocratic model of governance” that makes Facebook “less viable than a competitor whose governance gives owners a voice proportionate to the economics they have at risk.” The group also criticized the growing trend for such super-voting shares, saying, “Facebook appears to have taken the same outdated dance lessons as many other recent tech sector debutantes.”

Having Zuckerberg control 58 percent of the votes at Facebook isn’t likely to be a problem for anyone as long as the company is making smart decisions about what to do with its money and as long as the stock price is going up. But if it starts to go south and Facebook makes some unwise decisions, it will become obvious that such voting structures are a fair-weather friend: They are great to have when things are going well, but they can become a huge liability.

Before Steve Jobs had even passed away, people had already started playing the “who is the next Steve Jobs” game — trying to come up with names of technology and design visionaries who might be able to don the mantle of the Apple co-founder and CEO. Jeff Bezos of Amazon? Napster and Spotify founder Sean Parker? Those names and others have been floated by industry watchers, but listening to Twitter and Square founder Jack Dorsey at GigaOM’s RoadMap conference on Thursday made me think that he is at least as strong a contender for that mantle (if such a thing even exists) as any of them. Could Dorsey change the way we interact with technology and the world around us in as profound a way as Jobs?

Why do we even need an heir to Steve Jobs? The obvious answer is that we don’t. Jobs was unique, in both positive and negative ways, and the precise combination of those features made him who he was and thus made Apple what it was. No one is going to be the next Steve Jobs because they will have a different combination of strengths and weaknesses, and they may not be as lucky or as smart in specific ways. But when it comes to the role that Jobs played in technology — the role of visionary designer, creator, instigator and disruptor — we need those people more than ever, because visionaries inspire others, even if the things they do themselves don’t always succeed. They change the way we look at the world in fundamental ways.

I haven’t spent a lot of time around Jack Dorsey, but based on his conversation with Om at RoadMap, he clearly spends a lot of time thinking about the big picture behind the technology that he is involved in. So it’s not just about Twitter and how it works — or what it looks like or even how to monetize it — but how it connects us to our own “humanness” as he put it, and enables us to experience things and see through the eyes of others. He described how he found this an incredibly powerful thing during the protests in Iran, and I think others have had a similar response to the events of the Arab Spring and the earthquakes in Japan and Haiti.

And when it comes to Square — the other company that Dorsey is helping to shape and create — it’s not just making payments easier or more efficient that interests him, but how making that easier can help artisans and individuals become fully functioning businesses more easily, and how that could help change society.

Dorsey’s roles with two very different companies have also sparked some comparisons to Jobs, who helped revolutionize animated films with Pixar while also changing the personal electronics industry at Apple (the differences between Square and Twitter are arguably even more dramatic than Pixar and Apple, since Square is a device that people pay for and Twitter is a service). And Dorsey was also forced out of the company he founded, much like Jobs was — after a dispute with former CEO Evan Williams, who funded the company in its early years — and then returned to become the product visionary.

One of the things that is very different about Dorsey and Twitter stems from the fact that Twitter is a service rather than a product. Under Steve Jobs, Apple excelled at product design, but it has been notoriously inept at anything service related: iTunes, to take just one example, is a total mess when it comes to usability and design despite years of evolution, and things like Ping have effectively been stillborn. One of the most powerful things about Twitter, however, is the way in which the service was transformed by its users, with additions like the @ mention and the retweet — features that were never even imagined by its creators. Steve Jobs, by contrast, wouldn’t even let people replace the battery in his products.

From what I can tell, Dorsey also seems to be missing what could charitably be called the “difficult” elements of Jobs’ personality (other people have more blunt terms for it), which are detailed in Walter Isaacson’s biography: the shouting, the merciless humiliation, the ruthlessness even with friends, the crying in meetings, and so on. One of the questions that this description of Jobs raised for me is whether those things were a necessary part of his success as a visionary and designer, or were they simply character flaws? Would Apple products have been the same, or been as revolutionary, if he were a different kind of person.

So is Jack Dorsey the new Steve Jobs? Probably not. But that said, he clearly has a vision about two fairly significant areas of the technology sphere — the way in which even a simple service like Twitter can change the way we interact with each other and distribute information in a digital and connected world, and the way a simple payment service like Square can potentially transform entrepreneurialism and small businesses. And he is thoughtful about the implications of those things in a way that many product or business-focused technology executives are not (he even has a fascination with the application of Zen Buddhist principles to design, as Steve Jobs did).

Dorsey has already altered the media landscape with Twitter — whether he knew that was what he was doing or not. And he is trying to alter the payment landscape as well with Square, which could ultimately help make it easier for entrepreneurs and small businesses to get paid. Whether those changes will be as massive and transformational as the ones Jobs unleashed remains to be seen, but we could definitely use more visionaries.

A decade ago, Microsoft finally settled a long-running antitrust case that was launched against the software giant by the Department of Justice, based on accusations that the company was using its monopoly on computer operating systems to crush competitors. Now it is Google’s turn to face the antitrust spotlight: Although it is not the subject of a formal government case yet, the search behemoth is involved in an official inquiry by the Federal Trade Commission, which is investigating whether Google is distorting the market for web search and search-related advertising.

What makes this case more difficult than the one against Microsoft — and ultimately a lot harder to prove — is the question of what a monopoly even means in the age of the web, when the browser has taken over from the operating system as the primary way in which we use our computers and mobile devices. Does Google have a monopoly in any real sense? And if it does, can it be shown that the company is using that position unfairly, causing harm either to competitors and/or to consumers of web services?

Critics of the company argue that both of these things are true. And the list of Google’s enemies is a fairly long one, including fellow giants like Microsoft — one of the main proponents of the antitrust allegations, somewhat ironically — as well as large web services like Expedia and the recommendation service Yelp, who argue that Google is giving its own competing services preferential treatment and thereby distorting the market. And Google isn’t just facing antitrust inquiries in the U.S.: It is also under investigation in several European countries for similar alleged offences.

A monopoly on search and search-related ads

The charges being leveled at Google are twofold. One is that it has a monopoly on search and on search-related advertising and that this gives it an unreasonable amount of control over how content is found online — since search is the primary way that many people discover websites and services — as well as an ocean of cash from search-related advertising. The second allegation is that Google uses the money from its advertising monopoly to develop or buy services that compete with those from other companies and that it then uses its control over search to give those services preferential treatment in its search results, which provides an unfair advantage.

So in the case of Yelp, whose founder and CEO, Jeremy Stoppelman, testified in a recent Senate hearing regarding Google’s behavior (which wasn’t part of the official FTC investigation but raised many of the same issues), the claim is that when Google couldn’t acquire the company for its local recommendations, it first tried to steal Yelp’s content and use it without asking, threatened to remove Yelp from Google’s search results altogether and then bought a competing service called Zagat.

This effectively pulls in all the different aspects of the antitrust case against Google, to the extent that there is a case: the use of its giant cash reserves to try and take over Yelp; the “scraping” of Yelp’s content for use in Google’s own local service, Google Places; the pressure on Yelp to play by Google’s rules or face deletion from its all-powerful search index; and finally, the acquisition of a competitor, to which Google is allegedly giving preferential treatment in its search results. Expedia made similar allegations about Google following its purchase of ITA, which provides travel-related information that is used by Expedia and other services (a deal that was reviewed by the FTC).

Having a monopoly isn’t enough for antitrust

As I tried to explain in a recent GigaOM post, antitrust law in the U.S. doesn’t make having a monopoly in a particular market illegal. What the Sherman Act is designed to fight are monopolies that have been achieved through illegal means (i.e., collusion or restraint of trade) and/or monopolies that are being used to harm a particular sector. But it’s even more complex than that. Unfortunately for Yelp and Google’s other critics, it’s not enough just to show that a company with a dominant market position is being unfair to its competitors. It has to be proven that being unfair has some tangible impact on the market, either by restricting choice or raising prices or both.

So Yelp might argue that Google is being unfair by a) taking its content without asking and b) giving its own Zagat results a higher ranking in search (assuming it can even be shown that Google is doing this). But does Google’s behavior have any impact apart from being unfair to Yelp? Does it restrict consumer choice when it comes to recommendations services in any real way? And if it does, will consumers have to pay more for those services? Similar questions would have to be asked about Google’s dominance in search itself or search-related advertising. Does that dominance affect consumers in a tangible way?

Thomas Barnett, the former head of the Justice Department’s antitrust division, argued in a presentation to the Senate committee that Google’s control over search-related ads would lead to higher prices for those ads and that consumers would pay more because the companies buying those ads would inevitably pass those higher costs on to their customers. But this is not obvious at all. Even if someone could prove that prices for search ads are higher than they should be (whatever that means), an antitrust case would then also have to prove that companies were passing those costs on instead of just absorbing them.

One of Barnett’s counterparts, a former antitrust specialist with the New York attorney’s office who worked on the Microsoft case, argues that Google simply doesn’t fit the description of an illegal monopolist in the same way that Microsoft did. One of the main reasons for this is that Google provides a web service that is free to anyone and that has multiple well-funded competitors (including Microsoft itself). Users are not forced to search in Google, nor are they forced in any real sense to pick Zagat’s reviews over Yelp’s, or Google Travel’s results over those from Expedia or Travelocity.

Dominant web players rarely last long

I’ve argued before that one of the most powerful arguments against a federal antitrust case against Google is that such investigations rarely have much impact, in many cases because they drag on too long and involve so much complicated testimony that is difficult to prove. Also, the market for technology itself usually does a good enough job of destroying or disrupting monopolies without the government’s help. A research paper that looked at several high-profile cases, including Microsoft’s and AT&T’s, came to a similar conclusion. In almost every case, technological change had more of a tangible effect than any government investigation or penalty did.

Google, for example, is under significant pressure from the socialization of the web. The way that people find content and services is being altered by the popularity of social networks like Facebook and Twitter — to the point where search may no longer be the primary way that people find new services. Google is trying to take advantage of that phenomenon by building its own Google+ network, and by adding “+1” recommendation features to its search. But will this be enough? It’s entirely possible that Facebook’s social search (which is currently powered by a partnership with Microsoft) could become a significant competitor to Google.

If and when Google does wind up testifying to the Federal Trade Commission or the Department of Justice, it might even argue that Facebook is the real threat — due to its control over the social-networking market, its refusal to release data to competitors such as Google and its powerful relationships with Microsoft, Skype and other competing services. That might seem like a legal gambit, but there is a lot of truth to it as well. The web is still changing so quickly that even a seemingly unassailable monopoly like Google’s could be over before the government gets around to investigating it.

Many traditional media entities have embraced social-media services like Twitter and Facebook and blogs — at least to some extent — as tools for reporting and journalism, using them to publish and curate news reports. But newspapers in particular seem to have a hard time accepting the “social” part of these tools, at least when it comes to letting their journalists engage with readers as human beings. A case in point is the new social-media policy introduced at a major newspaper in Canada, which tells its staff not to express personal opinions — even on their personal accounts or pages — and not to engage with readers in the comments.

The policy, which I received from a source close to the Toronto Star, has a number of sensible things to say about using social media, including the fact that these tools “can be valuable sources for story ideas and contacts for journalists, and as a means of connecting directly with the communities we cover.” The paper also says that it “encourages journalists – reporters, columnists, photographers and editors – to take advantage of social media tools in their daily work.” But it warns that any comments posted using such tools “can be circulated beyond their intended audience.”

This all makes perfect sense. Social media is useful for journalism, and it does connect reporters to the communities they cover — better than just about anything else does. And yes, it is wise to be aware of the unintended consequences of even offhand remarks.

No talking about what you do

Then comes the part about being impartial and objective, and that’s when the trouble starts. The policy says that reporters and editors should “never post information on social media that could undermine your credibility with the public or damage the Star’s reputation in any way, including as an impartial source of news.” And that’s not all — the document goes on to say that:

Anything published on social media – whether on Star sites or personal platforms – cannot reveal information about content in development, newsroom issues or Star sources. Negative commentary about your colleagues or workplace will not be tolerated.

In other words, no posting about stories that are being worked on, no comments on newsroom-related topics, no talking about people who might be used or are being used as sources for Star reporting. And this prohibition doesn’t just apply to Star accounts or services under the newspaper’s name — it applies to any comments that a reporter or editor might make on their own personal accounts as well. Obviously the paper doesn’t want staffers bad-mouthing each other or talking about sensitive internal issues (something the New York Times also confronted last year), but a blanket ban on anything related to content seems unnecessarily harsh, not to mention completely unrealistic.

Never talk to your readers

It gets worse. The policy goes on to say that journalists who report for the Star “should not editorialize on the topics they cover,” because readers could could construe this as evidence that their news reporting is biased — and then tells reporters and editors that they shouldn’t respond in the online comments on stories. It says:

As well, journalists should refrain from debating issues within the Star’s online comments forum to avoid any suggestion that they may be biased in their reporting.

This last prohibition is a classic case of missing the point completely. According to the Star, apparently, comments on news stories are something that exists to allow readers to talk amongst themselves, not something that a reporter or editor should get involved in. That’s just wrong. As someone who was intimately involved in social-media strategy for another major metropolitan newspaper in Canada (full disclosure: this paper competes with the Toronto Star to some extent), one of the main features of having comments is the ability for readers to interact with writers and editors at the paper.

Treating the comments section as something that journalists shouldn’t get involved in turns it into a ghetto, and also contributes to the problems that many newspapers have with flaming and trolls and other issues — why should anyone behave properly in a comment forum if none of the staff at the paper are going to bother getting involved?

Never express an opinion on anything

The Star is far from alone in this short-sighted approach. Apart from a few staffers here and there who make use of Twitter and other social media, most major newspapers have still failed to take advantage of these tools when it comes to building relationships between their writers and readers. The biggest single factor holding them back seems to be fear — namely, a fear that they will no longer be seen as objective, something NYT executive editor Bill Keller reinforced in a recent column, in which he suggested that the paper was one of the few remaining holdouts in a world where everyone feels free to state their opinion.

Here’s a news flash for Bill, and for the rest of the newspaper world: that particular genie is already out of the bottle and has been for some time now. As journalism professor Jay Rosen has argued, the “view from nowhere” that mainstream media continues to try and defend is not only dying, but arguably does readers a disservice — since it often distorts the news in order to maintain a perfectly balanced (and unrealistic) view of events. Some journalists, like ** in a recent column in The Atlantic, have started to admit that they have personal interests and causes, but that remains rare.

The point that newspapers and other traditional media are missing is that social media is powerful precisely because it is personal. If you remove the personal aspect, all you have is a glorified news release wire or RSS feed with links to your content — and that has very little power any more. The best way to make social media work is to allow reporters and editors to be themselves, to be human, and to engage with readers through Twitter and Facebook and comments and blogs.

Is there a risk that someone might say something wrong? Of course there is. But without that human touch, there is no point in doing it at all.

Update: Toronto Star spokesman Bob Hepburn got back to me and said that the paper’s policy was “well in line with what mainstream media organizations have always done. We’ve always placed some limitations on journalists in terms of them expressing their opinions, either in the newspaper or outside of the newspaper.”

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user World Economic Forum

Does Facebook have a little Twitter envy? The smaller of the two social-media tools has become virtually synonymous with journalism — thanks in part to the fact that it is more of an information network than a social network, and to the example set by journalists such as the NPR’s Andy Carvin in how to use it for journalism. Now Facebook seems to be trying to reach out to the media industry by offering more resources for journalists, including a dedicated page that the giant social network launched Tuesday.

The Facebook page says that it plans to become an ongoing resource for journalists who want to figure out the best ways to use the network as part of their jobs, and will be highlighting “best practices” engaged in by a number of media outlets and reporters who use it well. The blog post announcing the launch of the page also points out that Facebook has been helping media companies become more social for the past year or so by integrating plugins and “like” buttons as well, which the social network says has produced “a greater than 300% increase in referral traffic from Facebook” on average.

Although it is a much smaller service in terms of the overall number of users (how much smaller exactly remains a matter of some debate), Twitter seems to have realized relatively early on that it is a perfect tool for journalists — both the professional kind and the amateur kind. This became fairly obvious even before the recent uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia, during news events such as the Hudson River plane landing in 2009 and the Haiti earthquake last year. And Twitter has been working to capitalize on that for some time.

The service has had a media page that shares best practices — including lessons on how to think about hashtags — for almost a year now, and has a media team that includes Chloe Sladden — who was featured on the cover of Fast Company magazine recently — and well-regarded writer and blogger Robin Sloan. Among other things, the team has talked regularly at conferences (including GigaOM’s NewTeeVee Live) and elsewhere about how Twitter can be used to amplify and extend the reach of media events such as the Academy Awards.

The one thing that Facebook has going for it over Twitter, of course, is sheer reach. Over half a billion people go to the site daily, and millions more interact with Facebook content via its open-graph plugins and “like” buttons. News sites such as The Huffington Post have made great use of this kind of integration to drive engagement and traffic, and Facebook is clearly pushing this idea as part of its latest launch. Things like hosting a live address by President Obama will probably help as well.

There are also some great examples of journalists using Facebook, including New York Times writer Nicolas Kristof, who has been posting to his page from the Middle East and elsewhere, and is perhaps one of the most engaged mainstream journalists I know of. His page has 200,000 fans, and he routinely gets hundreds of comments on the things he posts, which in some cases appear only on Facebook. NPR under Andy Carvin has also made great use of Facebook, as I described in a recent post.

Those examples aside, however, the challenge for Facebook is that while Twitter seems perfectly designed to be a real-time news and information network, many users still likely think of Facebook as a place to socialize rather than be informed — a place to play games, or look at funny pictures and videos, but not necessarily a place where journalists are active. Those things may not be mutually exclusive, but it’s going to take some work to make them feel like they belong together.

Why do people like to fool each other — or at least try to — on the first day of April? No one really knows for sure, but it’s one of the most enduring unofficial holidays of modern times, celebrated (or in some cases, barely tolerated) in dozens of countries around the world. And for whatever reason, the technology world is even more fond of this holiday than probably any other. In this post, we’ve collected some of our favorite pranks and bogus news stories from today for your amusement — if you come across any that you particularly enjoyed, feel free to add them in the comments.

But before we get started, it’s worth noting that one of the biggest April Fool’s jokes of all time might be the day itself — no one can seem to agree on how or why it became popular. One theory is that it started with the change to the Gregorian calendar in 1582, which moved New Year’s Day from the last week of March to January. Those who continued to celebrate in March (a celebration that usually lasted until April 1) were called April Fool’s. The only problem is that there are references to the idea of April and fools that pre-date the change to the Gregorian calendar.

Another theory is that it started with the Persian tradition of playing pranks on people on the 15th day of the New Year’s celebration of Norouz, which usually falls on April 1st and is known as Sizdah Bedar. This tradition apparently goes back to 536 B.C. And to make things extra confusing, plenty of countries celebrate something like April Fool’s on other days — like the 28th of December (if you want to see what April Fool was like in 1861 in the United States, check out this fascinating post from the NYT).

And now, on to the monkeyshines, drollery and shenanigans:

• Hulu Time Travel: points for effort goes to Hulu, which set up a complete homepage as the service would have appeared in the 1990s, complete with links to actual episodes of Newsradio, Kids In The Hall, 21 Jump Street and other shows — and featuring a modem-connecting noise when you click to watch. Well played, Hulu.

• Gmail Motion: the web giant says it is launching a Kinect-style interface to its email service that will let people navigate with physical gestures — the video with this one is worth watching, if only for the guy who gets to illustrate the movements (according to a blog post, Google is also changing all of its sites and services to Comic Sans, the most hated font ever invented).

• The Swiss WikiLeaks Scandal: according to a leaked cable, the Swiss government has been hiding surveillance systems in ceremonial cuckoo clocks that it has been giving to foreign diplomats for the past 30 years.

• The PlayMobil Apple Store: the gadget and gift site ThinkGeek has become a staple of April Fool’s for nerds, in part because its fake products are so perfectly believable — and this year it’s a PlayMobil replica of the Apple Store. Fake items from previous years have become so popular that the site has actually produced them as real products, included the TaunTaun Sleeping Bag and others listed here.

• ShopSavvy Becomes GreyScale: poking fun at the recent blockbuster financing — and associated controversy — by the iPhone photo-sharing app Color, this is a nice touch from ShopSavvy: the tagline for the new service GreyScale is “share photos — with no one.” But will Color think it’s funny?

• HuffPo’s Pay Wall — Just For the NYT: Some April Fool’s pranks have a kind of edge to them, and this new pay wall just for New York Times employees has that feel to it: not only is it a poke at the NYT pay plan, but a jab at the paper that has slammed Huffington for aggregating its content (bonus points to Arianna for testing the new feature in Winnipeg). The special terms of the paywall — all links from Facebook are free, provided they lead to stories about animals with extra limbs — are also hilarious.

• Sir Richard Branson Buys Pluto: the founder of Virgin Records, Virgin Airlines and about 300 other things named Virgin likes to do things large, so it’s fitting that he says he is buying Pluto and will have it reinstated as a planet.

• LinkedIn Recommends Robin Hood: the best April Fool’s jokes are ones that play on the core features of a service, and LinkedIn has done a pretty — and, unlike many other pranks, subtle — job with its “you may know” feature today, which suggests people like Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg (“this may be Werner Heisenberg’s profile”) and Robin Hood (“activist, chief fundraiser at Nottingham”).

(screenshot courtesy of Dan Hocking)

• Seth Godin Introduces Whitespace Ads: points for creativity should go to marketing blogger and author Seth Godin, who announced the launch of a new advertising vehicle that will use the white space in between paragraphs for links that will be highly targeted, location-based and unobtrusive — mostly because they will be invisible.

• Flattr Partners With North Korea: for true geek cred, you can’t get any better than a donation service started by one of the founders of The Pirate Bay — “brokep” describes how Flattr is going to be used by North Korea to manage the entire economy. Knowing North Korea, this isn’t really that far-fetched.

• Mozilla Launches “Do Not Fool” Standard: this one is so meta that it hurts: Mozilla has a browser header that allows you to automatically inform websites that you do not want to be fooled — a play on the “Do Not Track” header proposal for privacy protection from advertisers. Going to install this one now.

If geekish pranks are your thing, the site Hacker News is collecting them — including a new product that acts like AdBlock does in the web world, but in real life: a pair of goggles that automatically remove advertising from whatever you are looking at. And even Wikipedia has gotten into the April Fool’s Day game — but what appear to be fake articles are actually links to factual information that isn’t really what it seems, like the fact that Batman is half female.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Mykl Roventine