Should companies put together April Fool's jokes on their online services?

At Google's main campus, there is the statue of a T-rex. It has been perpetually attacked by flamingos. When it first happened, it was a whimsical joke. Someone thought it was funny, did it, and people were amused.

But now it is tradition. It must be attacked by flamingos. Maybe there's some value in leaving the joke for new people to experience -- XKCD's 10,000 a day and all that -- but it also feels a little soul-crushing to see those sun-bleached flamingos and feel like listening to someone repeat the punchline to a joke 15 times because they were so happy it got a laugh the first time.

Sometimes whimsy has to live in the moment and go away afterwards.

April Fool's is borderline; elaborate pranks requiring considerable planning and set-up are a part of the tradition of April Fool's, so a team of a dozen having weekly standups for 10 weeks to set up an April Fool's joke is actually probably par for the course. But when it becomes too top down, driven by the tradition and "well we've done this before, we got a laugh, we should do it again", it starts to feel too ritualized for proper whimsy.

There's also the angle of personal relationship to consider. A proper April Fool's prank is personal, targeted at a particular friend or family member (or group thereof), and ideally with some lead up that culminates on April 1st. Without that personal angle, it becomes too much like a TV prank show, where a giggling host is just tricking unsuspecting members of the public, which is too easy to end up mean or cruel because you don't know the target. Sure, an April Fool's joke is on someone, but after the target realizes what was going on, they should find it funny too. If they just feel put upon or made fun of -- or worse, traumatized -- it's your fault for picking the wrong target for the wrong prank.

If you have a personal relationship with your customers, maybe a company can pull of a good prank, but when you're just blasting it out to the unsuspecting public, you'll just have a lot of confused people who don't get the joke, and some who feel genuinely insulted or hurt or angry.