You used to be able to avoid April Fool gags by having a lie-in until midday. The internet makes it more difficult, with pranksters setting to work the night before, desperate to create for us the online equivalent of the apple-pie bed. On Friday, digital accessories company Gear4 revealed news of their “iRon”, a combined steam iron and iPod which gets the creases out of shirts while you “dance away your washday blues”; blogs with no sense of, er, irony, reported breathlessly how the steam jets were controlled by the tempo of the music. Hoaxes that presupposed some technical knowledge were received more quizzically, such as the announcement that an Australian company would be rolling out an ADSL2+ service, capped at 2Mbps with the remaining bandwidth reserved for streaming television and VoIP. Thigh-slapping stuff.

Google have an annual tradition of April japes, and their effort was cleverly deceptive at first glance. Technology websites are always buzzing with speculation about each new move Google make, and particularly so over the past six months: news of the blog search engine, e-payment facilities, blogging and chat applications, journey planners and webpage building tools are all clamorously received. So the announcement of Google Romance, with the tagline “love is just another search problem”, only raised an eyebrow when you got to the bit about “thematically appropriate multimedia advertising” being provided during your date. As Google hotly pursues total omnipresence, it’s almost predictable that they’d end up chaperoning us through a relationship.

But if Google aims to dominate the planet, Google Earth is the most effective weapon it has to reduce us to acquiescent droids. It provides aerial pictures of the globe, giving us a satellite’s eye view of country lanes, waterfalls, volcano craters – and is surely the biggest threat to time management since Solitaire came bundled with Windows. Whole working days slip by while you gently hover over Bedfordshire at 5,000 feet, and as I focussed the crosshair on my parents’ house yesterday, an hour was wasted discussing when that particular aerial shot was taken. “We sold that red car in February 2004,” said my mother, “And you can see flowers in the garden, so it must be summer. Terry next door, now he’s had two cars the same colour, so which is it? And when did we got rid of that compost heap?” Internet evidence suggests that countless others have found themselves similarly infatuated by the program, while unearthing oddities such as the Lancaster bomber flying over Huntingdon, or the 40-metre profanity carved into a field outside Billingley, Yorkshire. When, on April Fools Day, programmers placed a couple of cartoon aliens on Google Earth at Nevada’s Area 51, the famed UFO conspiracy site, they knew it wouldn’t be long before someone discovered them – and, sure enough, it took scant minutes. This news didn’t make my sides split or my ribs tickle, but that might be because I was too busy laughing at the 40-metre profanity in a field outside Billingley, Yorkshire.