I have already some experience with April's fool on the web. I know this is a very busy days where nearly 1/2 tech news is fake and the chance to get noticed is very low. This is why we decided to move our private April's fool for Topify.com ( Just for the context: we claimed Fedex sued us on copyright infringement on a so called registered patent to deliver better and faster email notifications. No comment.)....a day in advance. Just to make sure we get noticed. Which worked quite well. 
- The first reason is that the information sounded credible but ridiculous once you were digging inside the news.
- The second is that we involved our community of users which participated in the majority (because they care), which made us yesterday one of the most retweeted (meaning published) news of the day for a couple of hours (this is real time). The last
- The 3rd is that we set 2 rounds of Twits to notify the "bad news": one for Europe time and one for the US. Early am is what seams to work well
- The 4th reason is that we disclose it was a fake not too soon and not too late (meaning a little before the 1st) when we saw some people were starting to really fall for for it (a lawyer even contacted us for offering his free services)
So one tip: if you plan an april's fool, just plan it a little in advance and monitor what happens in real time as much as you can. We had so much fun yesterday. We sincerely apologize to our friends and users for the fake scare and hope they ll laugh with us too
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