No one is quite sure about the origins of April Fool’s Day, but what remains certain is that every year people try to out-do themselves to pull off incredible pranks. Now that we’re in the digital age, many of these tricks show up online. While we didn’t see anything this year that rivaled the BBC’s Swiss Spaghetti Harvest or Taco Bell’s purchase of the Liberty Bell, there were some gems. My three favorites were:

– Think Geek’s Apple Store Playset and Arsenic Sea Monkeys – I would actually give my children these toys

– Hulu 1996 –  I miss the world of scrolling links and dithered GIFs. It made me so nostalgic that I had to pull up my own Geocities site in the Internet Archive.

– Groupon –  Went in head first with a terrible premise, but totally redeemed themselves in the execution. The billion dollar boys let us know that they had submitted a patent for April Fools Day. The Groupon legal team then went after people on Twitter and sent cease and desist letters (PDF) against Youtube, Hulu, Think Geek and other companies that also had 4/1 ruses. Bravo Groupon. Just when I thought I was out, you pulled me back in.

Other winners for me:

– Sierra Club offering an exhilarating disservice trip through strip-mined Appalachia

– Ikea Australia’s dog high-chair

– Whole Foods’ not-really-that-far-fetched line of new offerings

– Toshiba’s 3D monocle

– U.S. Army’s updated headgear

Google typically leads the charge (who could forget Gmail Paper?), but 2011 was a lean year for the masters in Mountain View. Motion (Gmail and Docs) and Fonts (Helvetica and Comic Sans) seemed to grab the headlines, but a job listing for an Autocompleter was my favorite. Of course Youtube really nailed it with their 1911 button, which transported you back to the early days of film – turning your video black and white and overlaying a piano on the audio track. Just for lulz, the guys paid homage to Antoine Dodson:

On some videos, you can still get the effect by adding &=vintage=1911 to the end of the URL.

There were some that really fell flat too (all of the organizations that think paywalls are funny, for example), but let’s not dwell on the negative. Let’s use our energy to come up with bigger and better pranks for next year…only 362 days until April Fool’s Day 2012!