YouTube for April Fool's Day

While many sites and companies try to outright prank visitors with fake news, stories announcements, YouTube's taking a bit of a different approach. In a bit of a roleplay scenario, YouTube is pretending to celebrate 100 years on the Web with a look back at what the video sharing site would have been like in 1911.

"It’s hard to believe that just a century ago, YouTube was a fledgling video site for paupers and presidents alike. Today, we celebrate 100 years of YouTube, and we thought we would reflect on our inaugural year with a re-print of our first blog post from 1911," YouTube states in a blog post. "In honor of this milestone, today’s homepage is a reproduction of how you might have viewed it 100 years ago. Check out some of the most popular videos of the time and be sure to try out our new upload mode which summons a horse-drawn carriage to pick up your video submission from your home.

You'll find lots of sepia tones, old school video reels, and piano soundtracks as part of the makeover, as well as a humorous "Top 5 Viral Pictures of 1911" video.
Google, which owns YouTube, has a history of capitalizing on April Fool's Day with quirky announcements. This year, one of those is Gmail Motion, a spoof on all the motion controlled technologies as of late.