Yesterday, TechCrunch posted an article titled Facebook Now Lets You Fax Your Photos. I Have No Idea Why Anyone Would Want To Do This:

Wow, talk about a big day for Facebook. Hours after launching Facebook Lite, open-sourcing part of FriendFeed’s code, and launching @ tagging, the site has one more release in store for today: Fax This Photo, powered by efax.com. Now when you’re looking through photo albums, you’ll have the opportunity to send a photo you like to a friend’s fax machine. For price of $1.50 per photo. That’s one pricey fax.

They even tested it out - it really worked.

Except it turns out that the good folk at TechCrunch were completely and utterly punk’d by Facebook:

So we’ve had our fun with Facebook over the years (Why We’re Suing Facebook For $25 Million In Statutory Damages, Republican PR Director Calls Facebook’s Randi Zuckerberg “totally full of sh*t”, Randi Threatens a Bar Bouncer). But in general these things are supposed to flow one way – we mess with them, they take it gracefully.

Today that changed. They punk’d us, and we fell for it. Hard.

Read the article. It’s hilarious. The fact that Facebook actually implemented the fax send (i.e. it wasn’t just some web stuff) shows the lengths they went to. TechCrunch can sometimes be rather controversial as “journalists” (e.g. they published a range of highly sensitive documents that had been stolen from Twitter). That Facebook went this far is both disturbing and funny.