You didn’t have to look too far on April 1st to find examples of web sites playing practical jokes on their readers. And you didn’t have to look much farther to find examples of readers who were getting mighty tired of the practical jokes.

2006 may go down in online history as the beginning of the end for webbified April Fools’ Day pranks. It isn’t just the sheer volume, although this year it seemed to have expanded exponentially. It’s the fact that people fell for some of them… including some very prominent political blogs in the U.S. that seized on faux news reports, only to recant red-faced a few hours later.

(Maybe that’s a measure of just how far politics has descended: parody now seems perfectly plausible.)

It’ll be interesting to see what Washington, DC-based murky coffee does on April 1, 2007, after their experience with this little amusement they posted on their (very engaging) blog this year:

On Sunday, April 2, 2006, both murky coffee locations will no longer be offering wi-fi internet access. We understand that this will inconvenience a lot of our customers, and for that we’re very sorry.

Please visit Jiwire.com for information on places that offer wi-fi internet access.

For questions or comments, feel free to email us at email@murkycoffee.com.

By 11:00 p.m., some poor employee was keying in the following:

To all of the folks who emailed us today with angry words of hate and disappointment… I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive us… forgive us and please remember today’s date and all that it means.

Apparently that still wasn’t enough, because the plaintive April 19th update to that post reads:

It’s called April Fools, folks

Wanna bet next year, they’re doing something much, much more low-key?

Updated: The very approachable Nick Cho of murky coffee filled me in on the details. This wasn’t their first prank, and it wasn’t their first batch of complaints – they get “at least a dozen each time.  Considering the typically small percentage of folks who will actually email or contact you for anything, it felt like a lot.”

Two years ago, our April 1st joke (here) was that Starbucks was developing an “indie coffee house” spin-off, and that we were being acquired as the pilot project.  I had people “congratulating” me for weeks and weeks.  The hilarious part of this was that in October of 2004, we bought an existing coffeehouse here in the area, and I overheard a customer tell another, “My friends says that it’s really Starbucks that’s buying this place, and it’s true… I saw it on the murky coffee website!”

Last year, after having become friends with more people in the industry, we announced we were expanding into Chicago and Portland… and I provided addresses… which were right across the streets from our friends at Intelligentsia (Chicago) and Stumptown (Portland) coffee companies, respectively.  Intelligentsia is a fairly good-sized company, with about 60 employees in their main office.  Panicked and shocked emails were exchanged on their internal system before more level-heads assured them it was a hoax.  The Chicago space mentioned in my blog post is actually a government building.

One more thing… I also host a podcast for coffee professionals at portafilter.net.  We discussed a slightly controversial topic (involving a coffeehouse in San Francisco who was doing very unusual things: firing all their employees, accusing people of trying to poison them, etc.), and on portafilter.net’s April 1 post, I wrote that we had to pull all of our podcasts off-line due to legal reasons.  I put them right back up the next day, but still got tons of emails, and a few phone calls.

Next year?  We’ll see.  I’d find it hard to imagine I won’t figure something out by then.