Google's Sentient Panda and Other April 1 Pranks

Cute, Google.

The web giant's annual April Fool's Day prank comes in the form of CADIE, the "Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity." CADIE, it seems, has become self-aware, selected an animé panda as her avatar, and started a blog to explore her burgeoning selfhood. Oh, and thanks to the new Gmail Autopilot feature, if you want, CADIE will also "scan every one of your incoming messages and automatically send the perfect reply," replicating your punctuation and emoticon preferences.

Elsewhere in the April Foolosphere, the Guardian announced its plans to shift from newsprint and a website to a Twitter-only format:

A mammoth project is also under way to rewrite the whole of the newspaper's archive, stretching back to 1821, in the form of tweets. Major stories already completed include "1832 Reform Act gives voting rights to one in five adult males yay!!!"; "OMG Hitler invades Poland, allies declare war see tinyurl.com/b5x6e for more"; and "JFK assassin8d @ Dallas, def. heard second gunshot from grassy knoll WTF?"

And Microsoft unveiled a new yodeling game, Alpine Legend, that comes with an alpenhorn and a live goat.

Does Gawker Media have something planned? Last year, the snark-blogging archipelago briefly gulled some people into believing that Condé Nast (which owns Portfolio, among other glossy titles) had purchased its women's site, Jezebel, and given it a corporate makeover.