Caroline McCarthy / The Social:
Google does April Fools’: ‘Custom time’ and a Mars trip  —  Happy April Fools’ Day!  —  As expected, Google’s Gmail rolled out a fake “custom time” feature, which purports to let users send e-mails into the past and consequently never miss important deadlines again.

Kara Swisher / BoomTown:
More on MicroHoo: Irritated Investors!  Angry Arbs!  Zen Microsoft?  —  So, I was making the rounds again of my sources at Yahoo’s major institutional investors yesterday and here’s the overall 411: Frustration.  Confusion.  Impatience.  —  And the bottom line from several of them-if Yahoo does …

InfoWorld:
Microsoft, Yahoo agree on buyout price  —  After much internal debate and industry speculation, Yahoo today agreed to be acquired by Microsoft, adding $2.6 billion to Redmond’s original offer of $44.6 billion on Jan. 31.  —  The agreement was reached near midnight last night …

Matthew Karnitschnig / Wall Street Journal:
Microsoft Unlikely to Raise Yahoo Offer  —  Microsoft Corp. is preparing to lay a long siege.  —  Two months after Microsoft made its $44.6 billion offer to acquire Yahoo Inc., the software maker has no plans to raise its bid, people close to the company say.

Austin Modine / The Register:
Dell axes 900 jobs in Austin plant shutdown  —  But hey, $3bn in savings!  —  Round Rock’s Sword of Dell-ocles has once again dropped on employees of the world’s number two PC manufacturer.  —  Dell today said it will close its Austin, Texas desktop PC manufacturing plant and lay-off 800-900 […]

Sir Richard Branson / Official Google Blog:
Announcing Project Virgle  —  In my life, I’ve had a lot of exciting adventures and launched a lot of ambitious business ventures.  I’m delighted today to announce Virgle, Inc., a joint venture between the Virgin Group and Google which qualifies on both counts.

Joe Wilcox / Microsoft Watch:
Windows: A Monopoly Shakes  —  [Editor’s Note: This is the first of two posts pulling data from Forrester report, “Enterprise Desktop And Web 2.0/SaaS Platform Trends, 2007”.]  —  Forrester Research published the data on Thursday, but only released it publicly today.

Anil Dash:
Your April Fool’s Day Joke Continues to Suck  —  Having been blogging for a few years, I’ve developed a few annual traditions.  This one’s a favorite: Warning you off of lame April Fool’s jokes on the web.  Every year, I get called a curmudgeon, or lambasted for having no sense of humor.

Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
YouTube RickRolls Users  —  If you aren’t familiar with RickRolling - it’s when someone puts a link on website to something, but it actually takes you to a music video of Rick Astley’s “hit” song Never Gonna Give You Up.  —  YouTube is RickRolling its own users on April 1.