Google Takes April Fool’s Seriously

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I won’t be doing any lame April Fool’s jokes. Among tech sites, it’s almost a given that they will be rolling out some sort of joke on April 1. Google has had several classic ones, and TiSP this year is another in that list. (Of course, their best April 1 announcement was Gmail, which no one believed because of their history of pranks).

TiSP works via fiber optic lines that run through your commode. It’s a free high speed internet service that serves ads (and this is the classic part)

To offset the cost of providing the TiSP service, we use information gathered by discreet DNA sequencing of your personal bodily output to display online ads that are contextually relevant to your culinary preferences, current health status and likelihood of developing particular medical conditions going forward. Google also offers premium levels of service for a monthly fee (see below).

Note: We take your privacy very seriously. So we treat all TiSP users’ waste-related personal information with tremendous discretion, in accordance with our Privacy Policy.

Of course this is a little dig at the information that Google collects that has several privacy groups up in arms and led to the current BusinessWeek cover story. The Privacy Policy has not been rewritten for the service, which shocks me as that is a detail I expect of Google. Though, clicking on several links brings up a 404 page that does amuse.

The requested URL was not found on this server. There are so many reasons that this might have happened we can scarcely bring ourselves to type them all out. You might have typed the URL incorrectly, for instance. Or (less likely but certainly plausible) we might have coded the URL incorrectly. Or (far less plausible, but theoretically possible, depending on which ill-defined Grand Unifying Theory of physics one subscribes to), some random fluctuation in the space-time continuum might have produced a shatteringly brief but nonetheless real electromagnetic discombobulation which caused this error page to appear. Or (and truth be told, this is by far the most likely scenario) you might have reached a page that we meant to create but didn’t get around to it, since this year’s April Fool’s joke got hacked together at the last minute, more or less the same way this one did. And this one. And this one, and this one, and this one

Ha! Good job, Google. The diagram with the Ph.D. sitting in the sewers is pretty good as well. No one believes this joke, which may be the best indicator of a great prank (see TechCrunch buying F’dCompany [language warning] for instance) but it’s a subtle dig at Google’s critics while keeping up their tradition of amusing April 1st antics.

That’s not all Google has in store, so GMail users should find out about their newest archiving service and blog writers should check out their writing service.


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