Ok so I was going to hide my head under a rock until this April Fool’s thing blew over, but Microsoft and Live Search are having so much fun, it’s worth a comment.  First up is the Live Search background image today, a classic:

(Check out Wikipedia for more on the Jackalope)

Then Kara Swisher, master of the leaked email, got another one today, only this time with tongue firmly in cheek:

Coming complete with screenshot, Kara received a “leaked” email announcing “Umok”:

In testing, Omuk scored very high on attributes like “empowering”, “organized” and “warm/fuzzy.” Another key attribute was ease of spelling and Omuk did very well. There was some concerns that people might spell it ohmuk or omuck but that didn’t happen.

The final key feature for the brand was verbability. Here marketing is planning to go with a little ingenuity and drop the o and just push “muk it.” In ads they will get playful and have the actors talk about the joys of accessing unlimited knowledge by just “muking around”, etc. The hope is to generate a lot of word-of-mouth and free impressions on the internet the way that the very successful Bill and Jerry commercials did for Windows.

Below is a sample homepage screenshot with the new brand. Really looks great. This also has the latest thinking on default “scopes.”

(hmm, ok we get the joke on the “adult” scopes, but the whole “Explore” UX actually looks kind of cool.  Is this “joke” revealing more than intended?)

Oh, and yes we got a little tripped up by the April Fool’s mania ourselves, and thanks to Dharmesh Mehta for taking it all with good humor, both in comments here and at Mynetx.net.  But we can’t help but notice how many readers both here and there think that Messenger interop would be a great idea.  Are you listening, Microsoft?