Google Hoaxes: Gmail Paper and TiSP (Beta)

I was unable to find anything searching for these two services on Google, until I came across a Wikipedia result. I knew they had to be another of Google’s April Fool’s jokes, but wanted to make sure before I said anything here about them. Of course they could go and make a fool out of me if one of them actually turns out to be real. Which one do you think would be more likely to be real? I don’t think I could answer that question if I had to.

Gmail Paper was announced on the Gmail login page early this morning, depending on your location, times may vary. This service would add a new feature to Gmail that would allow you to archive your e-mails in paper. Your e-mails would be printed on actual paper (”96% post-consumer organic soybean sputum“) and be mailed to your home. The part that I’m sure made people think that this couldn’t possibly be true: it’s a free service and you can have thousands, hundreds of thousands or even more printed and sent to you for free! This is where my brain started telling me that this couldn’t possibly be true.

Of course, to get us to believe it, Google added that it would be free because there would be very large, bold, red advertisements printed on the back of the messages. Okay, depending on how thick the paper is, we may never, ever see these advertisements. How many of you would turn your e-mails over to read advertisements? Besides being curious about what types of advertisements are printed. Would they be relevent to the content of each e-mail as they are in Gmail? Since they couldn’t possibly be clicked, would anyone really benefit from these advertisements?

And, the attachments, what about those? Any photos would of course be printed on high-quality glossy paper. No sound files would be printed. Oh but Google, why not print out lyrics or even music sheets with lyrics to any songs? I’m sure you could manage that!

The next service is Google TiSP (Beta). This one was almost believable as it was announced on the Google Search page as if it was any other notification of their other services. Of course, not thinking that it’s April Fool’s Day, I click on it, thinking, “Great! Free broadband!” and then started reading about it. After reading the page that only has a small summary of TiSP, it still did not occur to me that it was a joke.

Then, I visited the FAQ page. This is where I started skimming the page and realized I was reading about toilets, sewers and water companies. Even a couple of the requirements didn’t seem right to me:

• Round-front or elongated toilet providing at least 1.0 gallons per flush
• Use of automatic toilet bowl cleaners is not recommended

What does my toilet have to do with it? Well, it turns out that you have to insert a fiber-optic cable in the toilet and flush it. The picture they display shows a person wearing gloves inserting this long cable in their toilet. If this is the only toilet in the house, how do people use their toilet?

Can I still use my toilet after installing TiSP?
Do we look stupid? Needless to say, the fiber optic cable that enables TiSP will not interfere with your toilet’s regular operations. For your own convenience, however, you may eventually wish to hire a professional contractor to help route the cable under, or through, the toilet seat to your TiSP wireless router.

So, as you can see, once you read the FAQ page, you just know there is no way Google is being serious with this one. Good job though Google, I’m sure you fooled a lot of people into believing that you were offering two nice services. Are you sure you all have enough work to do?