{"id":1110,"date":"2007-03-31T16:32:37","date_gmt":"2007-03-31T21:32:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/2007\/03\/31\/congrats-mike-nice-april-fool-prank\/"},"modified":"2007-03-31T16:32:37","modified_gmt":"2007-03-31T21:32:37","slug":"congrats-mike-nice-april-fool-prank","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2007\/03\/31\/congrats-mike-nice-april-fool-prank\/","title":{"rendered":"Congrats, Mike — nice April Fool prank"},"content":{"rendered":"

It seems Mike Arrington has gotten the last laugh on more than a few<\/a> bloggers — with his announcement that he has bought Fuckedcompany.com. Even Dave Winer got reeled in<\/a> by the news. I don’t know for sure, but I’m willing to bet that Mike got the idea after reading the Valleywag post<\/a> about the sale of Fuckedcompany, which suggested Mike should buy it (my friend Steve O’Hear at ZDNet figured out the gag<\/a> too).<\/p>\n

\"fc300.png\"Mike’s post<\/a> on the “acquisition” was a masterpiece. But there were some clues amidst the press-release-style delivery, including comments like: “the audiences are about equal in size and have very little overlap.”<\/em> That one set off a warning bell for me — if Fuckedcompany.com has the same size audience as TechCrunch, I thought, then I am Darth Vader. Mike also said that “its clear that we are at the tail end of the current boom (disregard recent statements I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve made to the contrary).”<\/em> Ding! He also said “there just isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153wow\u00e2\u20ac\u009d factor around new startups like in 2004\/2005. That does not bode well for the future – there just isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t anything left to invent.”<\/em> Ding!<\/p>\n

Near the end of the post, Mike says that “we will likely move new startup coverage, which will be a secondary consideration going forward, to a new blog over time. TechCrunch and FuckedCompany will begin to mirror each other\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s content.”<\/em> Good one, Mike. Happy April Fool’s to you too.<\/p>\n

Update:<\/b><\/p>\n

In other April Fool’s-related news, Ionut. Alex Chitu has word<\/a> of a new Google offering called Google Writer that will automate blog posting for you, Markus Frind says his dating site Plenty of Fish and eHarmony are merging<\/a>, Google itself has announced Gmail Paper<\/a> for sending paper-based mail, as well as Google TiSP<\/a>, a plumbing-based wireless system for your house. And Google blogger Matt Cutts’ blog has apparently been hacked<\/a> by the Dark SEO gang. Wikipedia has more here.<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It seems Mike Arrington has gotten the last laugh on more than a few bloggers — with his announcement that he has bought Fuckedcompany.com. Even Dave Winer got reeled in by the news. I don’t know for sure, but I’m willing to bet that Mike got the idea after reading the Valleywag post about the … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Congrats, Mike — nice April Fool prank”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":false,"mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1110","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1110","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1110"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1110\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1110"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1110"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1110"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}