Apple iPad launches. Hell freezes. Politicians stop being corruptible. New era dawns

Wow, the iPad hasn’t even launched yet but it has been a crazy week.

Firstly Apple announced that the whole iPad thing was just a big April Fool’s joke. Those crazy kids.

Kleiner Perkins doubled down by increasing their iFund from $100M to $200M. Clearly, they didn’t hear about the aforementioned joke.

Apple is getting ready to tour people through the iPad with the oddly named “Meet Your New iPad” sessions. Surprising nobody, the marketing communications people are gushing that it will be an close look at “the most amazing features of iPad.” I’m pretty sure there will be lots of talk about “amazing magic” and “magic amazingness” in there too.

At 8:19am this morning, CNet wrote about the big names unveiling iPad apps including Netflix and EA. Then at 10:47am, Google announced that the Gmail team had released an HTML5 Gmail web app for iPad. Then a couple of hours later, InformationWeek’s Eric Zeman bitterly complained that the entire software universe had not yet instantly released new updated apps, particularly calling out uhhh…Google for not doing so. You just can’t make this stuff up.

Continuing on the market-readiness theme, there are rumours that the iPad will launch with 1000 iPad-specific apps. Meanwhile Apple has begun to create a list of websites that are iPad-ready. So far there are four. That leaves only 75 zillion left to update/catalog. Take that Adobe.

Speaking of Adobe, since Apple hates Flash, they need to line up organizations on their side of the fight. Seems like so far, they’re getting some bruisers into the game. CBS ABC, NYT, CNN, Sports Illustrated, Reuters, Vimeo, Hulu, Netflix, and MLB.com are all saying “screw you Adobe, we’re with Apple and HTML5.” Must be awkward at meetings when the NYT is asking for discounts on Adobe software.

The beleaguered magazine publishing industry launched their opening experimental salvos with a mix of free/freemium/paid offerings. Leading the pack in silliness was the Wall Street Journal with their offer of a $17.29/mo subscription. I’m not sure if that’s horrendous or brilliant. From a margin perspective, I suppose if they can get it, they’re laughing.

CNet finally beat the Onion news by writing the single best article on those creepy weird people who sleep in line-ups to buy first release products. Nice work CNet. Boo on you Onion News.

Mashable showed us how board games might be a killer app of sorts for the iPad. Finally, no need to dig those dusty boxes out of the top shelf in the spare room when the family comes over!

WordPress managed to build what I think might be the most useless app so far: a blogging app for iPad. I can’t imagine trying to build hypertext rich articles on the iPad. What a nightmare. I write my posts with 2 or 3 windows open and 2 monitors. Trying to do this in a single app with no multi-tasking would be horrific. Interestingly the almighty, ever-present and usually lucid Om Malik wrote a post titled “Why iPad will Change Blogging for me” in which he made the case that he wasn’t really sure it would and counted the many pains he could envision. Maybe he wrote that post on the iPad and that led to the cognitive dissonance.

Meanwhile in me-too land, a number of soon-to-be-forgotten players launched a number of indistingushable iPad alternatives. I’d give you the link, but really, why bother?

That’s the week that was on the eve of the launch of the iPad. Tomorrow a new era dawns.

Oh wait, there’s an iPad v2 coming with a camera? And multi-tasking? Okay, then maybe THAT’S the dawn of the new era.