Metafilter taken over by kuo5hin?

April 1, 2002 3:11 AM

Metafilter taken over by kuo5hin? April fool, everyone.
posted by Cobbler (22 comments total)

before
posted by feelinglistless at 3:16 AM on April 1, 2002

Whoops. Serves me right for not checking March 31st when suspecting an April 1st joke.
posted by Cobbler at 3:23 AM on April 1, 2002

go to JiFi for all your 006699 needs...
posted by rlef98 at 5:45 AM on April 1, 2002

Too brilliant for words. Innovative use of white background. I just hope it's a joke. It IS a joke right, MetaTalkers?
posted by boardman at 6:00 AM on April 1, 2002

*cough* That sure doesn't look like *nix...
posted by jgooden at 6:10 AM on April 1, 2002

beautiful.
Concidering MeFi and K5 are regular stops I just completely confused myself...
posted by KnitWit at 6:24 AM on April 1, 2002

Yeah, met4filter is(as you can tell) still running the oldstyle mefi backend. Give it a bit of time, and then you'll see something like this. Andrew Hurst has been going back and forth with Leonard Lin and Matt on the issue of converting mefi to scoop, but it's definately not going to be an overnight process.
posted by Driph at 6:26 AM on April 1, 2002

who moved my cheese?
posted by wfrgms at 6:49 AM on April 1, 2002

i'm doing a happy dance every time i see the words met4filter and scoop in the same sentence, wheee
posted by sawks at 6:59 AM on April 1, 2002

this is certainly one of the more well-planned (and believable) AFD pranks I've seen

enough hyperbole to make it seem believable, but enough niggly little flaws to dispel belief...

that and rusty's owing up to the prank on k5...
posted by cheaily at 7:39 AM on April 1, 2002

Maybe the true joke is that it is real and everyone is fooled because it is unveiled today ;)
posted by quirked at 7:51 AM on April 1, 2002

true dat :) hooray!
posted by kliuless at 8:10 AM on April 1, 2002

I still think MeFi should migrate to Scoop though. :-)
posted by rusty at 8:56 AM on April 1, 2002

I'm sending Matt the bill for the smelling salts.
posted by bunnyfire at 9:17 AM on April 1, 2002

I still think MeFi should migrate to Scoop so Rusty can do all the programming work I will no longer have to do. :)
posted by mathowie at 9:54 AM on April 1, 2002

Google pigeon-ranking. April fools.
posted by mad at 11:08 AM on April 1, 2002

Matt, Rusty: You were doing so well with the straight faces. What's with giving up the gig? It was genius, by the way. The Register story was nice. Did you plant that or did you actually do it because of the article?
posted by eyeballkid at 12:02 PM on April 1, 2002

eyeball: I called it dead around 10:00 AM EST because I didn't want to spend all day explaining and justifying. And no one on K5 was particularly upset. I was starting to feel bad, like everyone was digging the idea, and I was going to have to tell them it was a hoax. I'm just not cut out for this practical joke thing -- I don't have the nerve for it. :-)

The Reg article was the result of my asking Andrew Orlowski (who's been a friend of mine since I lived in SF, and is an inveterate prankster) if he wanted in on the gag. He kind of went his own way with it, but the article ended up pretty funny. Our plan was going to be that he'd reveal the "secret funding company" was actually AOL/TW. But he couldn't resist tweaking Dave Winer and Doc Searls while he was at it.

By the way, that "pollen blows to the top of the mountain" faux-quote from Doc nearly made me pee my pants laughing. It was probably only that funny to me and Andrew though. Oh well.
posted by rusty at 1:31 PM on April 1, 2002

I thought the faux Doc quote was quite funny. Sounded just like him.
posted by kindall at 2:42 PM on April 1, 2002

Back in blue! Ahhh...that's better!
posted by kirkaracha at 10:21 PM on April 1, 2002

whew.
posted by kv at 10:34 PM on April 1, 2002

"Blue Velvet"
posted by bjgeiger at 10:50 PM on April 1, 2002