The Best Startup April Fools Jokes 2011

It’s that one day of the year when the news is full of outright lies.

There are plenty of round-ups of some of the biggest April Fools jokes out there, so we thought we’d do something different and opt for April Fools just from Internet startups.

Here are some of the best that we’ve found. Have we missed any good ones? Leave a comment and let us know.

LiveDrive

LiveDrive says it has decided that physical backups are just as important as the cloud, so it’s now backing up its users’ data with barcodes. This makes the comapny Europe’s largest buyer of paper. Although it’s just a riff on Gmail’s paper backup spoof a couple of years ago, this is nicely done.

Hootsuite

Forget Angry Birds, Hootsuite has “launched” Happy Owls – an iOS game complete with seasonal variations and even a 3D mode. Okay, it’s just an owl with 3D glasses, but never mind.

VMware

In something of a coup, VMware has secured the contract to deploy a robust set of on-demand, IT services to Cloud City – a location best known to earthlings for its appearance in The Empire Strikes Back. They even got a celebrity in to discuss the deal.

SoundCloud

SoundCloud is often discussed as a successor to Myspace for musicians, so it’s decided to make its user profiles a little more ‘Myspace-y’ with customisable backgrounds. Just look how amazing Moby’s page looks now:

GoSquared

Want your website’s live site stats to be a little more ‘immersive’? GoSquared introduced 3D Livestats today, complete with a video requiring 3D glasses.

Twingly

How do ghosts use social media? They need a “social medium”, and that’s just what Twingly released today. “Ghosts have insight far beyond our worldly realms,” said CEO Martin Källström. “Combining this with the free speech of the blogosphere has a huge potential. This could be bigger than Wikileaks.” Next up, the company plans to launch keyboards with keys big enough for zombies to use accurately.

Also, check out:

Some of the big boys out there offered some great April Fool ideas too.

LinkedIn is offering a few familiar names that you might want to connect with.

Hulu‘s homepage has gone back to 1996 for the day, complete with TV hits from the day like The X-Files and Murder One on the front page.

YouTube celebrates its 100th birthday, while Google offers gesture-powered Gmail and a comic sans version of search results whenever you search for the more stylish ‘Helvetica’.