Aside from plotting pranks against our families and colleagues, our favorite part of April Fools’ Day are the ingenious spoofs pulled off by the world’s top internet companies.

Google has pranked unsuspecting users year after year with ruses such as Google Romance, the dating search engine and Gmail Paper, the free service that prints and snail-mails you your entire inbox.

This year, when I logged in to get directions, Google Maps looked strikingly low-tech.

Turns out the tricksters at Google had “optimized” Maps for the retro NES gaming system in 8-bit. If you played around with the feature, you could find hidden treasures and monsters in the maps.

Another favorite was YouTube’s “order on DVD” scheme, which boasted that you could order all of your favorite viral videos on hard copy. And ultra-hip internet eyewear retailer Warby Parker introduced their Canine Collection of shades, appropriately named Warby Barker.

Tell us, which internet April Fools’ jokes got you this year?

I received a notification from Facebook last month thanking me for seven years of membership on the Social Network.

Seven years? I thought to myself. I haven’t stuck with anything for seven years! If I had, I’d still be playing the recorder, wearing gaucho pants or tuning in religiously to American Idol (wait, people still do?)

My relationship with Twitter has followed a similar course. I joined in 2008 and tweeted at a relatively steady clip for the next four years. Since social networking took off, I can safely say I’ve been faithful to more sites – LinkedIn, Reddit, Tumblr and YouTube to name a few – than I’ve abandoned (Google Wave, anybody?)

So it’s been seven years, I reasoned. But between all of my regular sites, my social networking needs are pretty much met. Lots of things have remained the same, even in the face of change – like Larry King Live and Fenway Park.

And then, I started reading about pins. They infiltrated my Facebook page and Twitter feed. Much as I didn’t want yet another password to remember, the pins became like a thumbtack in my shoe – I had to explore.

Enter Pinterest. I think of it as a hybrid between the bookmarking sites like Digg or Reddit and design-heavy sites such as Tumblr and Flickr. Pinterest members capture images from sites that they browse and bookmark, or “pin” them onto a communal database (which, by the way, is user-friendly and simply beautiful.)

Once you’ve clicked, your pin becomes community property, for the entire user base to comment, like, and post the pin on their own board (known as “repinning.”) You can search Pinterest for your interests. Thirty minutes of half-conscious, 2am browsing led me to pinboards of craft projects, hairstyles, and baby animals in teacups.

An example of a Pinboard.

Pinterest is experiencing the exponential growth of a social network in its prime. Still, outside of creating a new, potentially aggravating set of internet vocabulary (“That is SO getting pinned!”), the concept is hardly unique. But I believe that’s what makes it so captivating. I’ve idled more than one night looking at pinboards stocked with stills from Saved By the Bell. Pinterest is in the business of making old new. And they’re the freshest of all right now.

John Kreiss of RecruitingBlogs.com addressed a point last week that is universal – whether you’re building houses or sourcing candidates – the debate of quality, or quantity. Obviously, in either case, a balance of the two is always ideal. But when money – and specifically commission – is thrown into the equation, things can change quickly.

In the hypothetical example Kreiss gives, one company hires five recruiters at a 10% of salary fee, while the other hires one, industry-specific recruiter at a 25% fee. The single, niche recruiter sends in four high-quality candidates, one of which is offered the position. The discount recruiters, on the other hand, provided many candidates – mostly from job boards. None of them were worth an interview, let alone a job offer.

Kreiss’s view? Quality trumps quantity, any day. And when the stakes – or in this case, the recruiters’ compensation – is lower, the quality of candidates is lower as well. Is his example too extreme? Perhaps. But it gives us – as recruiters, hiring managers, and house builders alike – something to consider when approaching a situation like this. How much are we willing to pay if we’re not willing to pay?

In ranking the world’s smartest career paths, professors always come out somewhere near the top of the list. Anyone who’s been to college (or been stuck next to a professor at a wedding reception or on the subway) can attest to the vast, often obscure knowledge possessed by people with a PhD. So, why is it that so many of us leave college with a full knowledge of botany but without a clue about how to get a job?

That’s where UrbanProfessor.com, a new social website with an honorary doctorate in How to Speak to Young People comes in.

UP’s business is young people. Their philosophy: success rarely lands in our laps. And in this economy, it’s become painfully obvious that no one is going to have a dozen messages from hiring managers the day after they walk across the stage with their degree.

UP provides the tools – from job and internship listings to articles on how to manage your money while you’re searching for work – through the channels that young people use the most: college speaking tours, event sponsorships, and above all, online. Young people’s first instinct, when they’re solving problems or seeking jobs, is to turn to the internet. UrbanProfessor.com has become a social hub chock-full of information, with a fresh perspective and a relatable voice.

Purpose from Urban Professor on Vimeo.

To date, Urban Professor’s work has been incredibly successful. And whether you’re a job seeker, an educator, or a hiring manager yourself, there is a lot to be learned from this project about the way to reach the millennial generation. For more information on Urban Professor, visit their website by clicking here.

This number, one of the first 20, uses only one vowel.*

Got your buzzer ready? This is a real question from an episode of Jeopardy!, where contestants have only fractions of a second to process the question, search the annals of their brain matter, and put their thumb on the buzzer before two others do.

To the average person, the task sounds incredibly daunting – that’s why it’s so entertaining to watch others struggle with this test of smarts and speed on TV. But for people like Ken Jennings – you may remember him as the unassuming software engineer from Utah who remained on the show for a total of 75 wins in 2004 – trivia utilizes some serious muscle memory. During his string of victories, we all started to wonder if he was mortal or machine.

This year, we got our answer. Ken and Brad Rutter, the Jeopardy! winner with the highest all-time earnings were pitted against Watson, an entirely new breed of contestant who would eclipse the champs and school us mere homo sapiens in the reach and power of technology. You see, Watson is the name given to the supercomputer invented by IBM specially designed to play the TV game show.

The 22Tango Search team had the chance to see Watson live in action at the National Retail Federation’s Big Show last weekend. And although it’s hard to see the thought process that ocurrs within Watson in milliseconds, its approach to answering Jeopardy! questions is surprisingly human. First, Watson takes the question and analyzes it, looking specifically for the object of interest, whether it’s a person, place or thing. Then, the supercomputer uses shallow analytics to search within its encyclopedic knowledge for answers. Once a crude list has been made, Watson collects and evaluates evidence against each of these answers, and finally combines the evidence to settle on one.

A computer upstaging Jeopardy!’s all-stars is all in good fun for the viewing public, but the future applications of Watson may prove revolutionary. Sam Palmisano, CEO and Chairman of IBM dreams of putting Watson and his future spawn to work in doctors’ offices, hospitals, customer service and financial hubs. For example, when a patient comes to a doctor complaining of dizziness, fatigue and extreme thirst, Watson can aggregate the information and use its analytics to suggest a diagnosis. Similarly, when a customer calls into a tech support hotline, the Watson technology can assess the mechanical problems and determine how to repair or replace them.

Years ago, technology like Watson was confined to books and movies about futuristic worlds. Now, the future seems a whole lot closer.

*The Answer: Seventeen. It uses the letter “E” four times!