April Fools, in the opinion of this writer, is the one day a year that annually ruins the internet and makes my job less fun. No longer are there exciting product launches and cool new technologies to discuss, critique, and cheer about, or if there are any, they're difficult to spot amongst all the silly noise. April Fools is the one day a year where technology publications Internet-wide eschew their duties to innovate and report on innovations, and instead post a bunch of what they think are clever lies, because they think it's fun and it's tradition and it's the thing to do on April Fools. Well, I say bah-humbug to all that.

This isn't just about tech publications, but the behavior of actual tech companies. Palm today decided to post the "we were gonna" April Fools prank by listing all the immensely clever things that they could have done on their official blog today and then finish off by noting, "But instead, we thought we'd give you a heads-up (for reals) to check back later today (or follow palm_inc on Twitter) for an update direct from the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco." Here we have a company that is on the brink of total and complete failure and that is looking for a home run from the Palm Pre to save their entire company. So they decide to (for reals) announce that they're going to announce something big at the beginning of April Fools day? Not the best move, in my opinion.

Google also decided to launch CADIE at 12:59:59pm last night. Glad Google has time to make funny jokes after announcing that they're laying off over 200 marketing and sales positions last week.

Gizmodo decided to be fake hacked today. TechCrunch decided to post about everyone else's April Fools pranks as their sibling site, CrunchGear announced their acquisition by General Mills and proceeded to clutter the tech news space with a bunch of nonsense posts. 

Dear Internet, you've been around for several years now. Isn't there enough noise clouding the signal with all the spam blogs out there, all the spam email, all the depressing news about the state of the economy? Does writing fake news all day long really make all that better? Time to grow up.