In the wake of last year’s Ideological Search success, the team at Yahoo! Labs did our best yesterday to further our understanding of deep April Fool’s science.  We used sophisticated methods from context-insensitive grammars, nonlinear pessimization and pseudorandom variables.

Or, to put it another way, we built a spoof website called ZOMG where you could put you and your friends into celebrity news stories “mad-libs” style and send them around to everyone you know.

We had a blast coming up with the storylines, designing the viral propagation and building the site over the last couple of days. And we hope everyone who had a chance to play with ZOMG enjoyed it as much as we did (we were helped by Carol, who got the game off to fun start herself).

We do a lot at Yahoo! Labs to try and understand the scientific phenomena underlying the Web. We’re always devising complex experiments, testing algorithms, machine learning and designing markets according to cutting edge economic concepts. Math, code and technical jargon abound at our lunches. But eccentricities aside, in our hearts and minds, we’re just like everyone else. We long to imagine ourselves as being “seen about town” and caught up in celebrity intrigue with Megan Fox. Well ok, some of us do.

All that being said, we did in fact learn a few things yesterday with ZOMG. We were curious about how transient flash interests like April Fool’s jokes disperse on the Web. What are the patterns of influence or rules of distribution, for example? We don’t have a full picture yet, but here are some very preliminary data (and watch for more in time, at the Labs website):

• By mid-afternoon, we had crossed 14,000 user-created stories
• The three top story categories were Baby Bumps, Seen About Town and American Idol

We’re starting to get used to this April Fool’s tradition and there’s no doubt the Web is a great playground to try stuff out on. And since we can technically pass off all of our jokes as sincere inquiries into the inner-workings of Internet science and culture, you’d better look out.

Wait until next year,
-Prabhakar Raghavan, Yahoo! Labs

P.S. One more interesting fact: if anyone is curious about who got the most fooled by ZOMG, the big winner is Tim Morse, Yahoo! CFO. Last night he was ready to throw our CMO Elisa Steele under the bus when she sent him the pretend FCC Fining Carol story as an urgent FYI. Congratulations, Tim!