On April Fool's Day 2006, Google announced the launch of new service Google Romance as an April Fool’s gag. This year too the search engine giant did not disappoint the millions of netizens who waited to see what the company had up its sleeve.
Google came up with two gags this year. The first was the launch of an in-home wireless broadband service code named the “Dark porcelain" project. This claimed to offer self-installed plumbing-based Internet access.
Google even released a rather official press release on the launch of this service called Toilet Internet Service Provider (TiSP). The release reads, “The Toilet Internet Service Provider project is a self-installed, ad-supported online service that will be offered entirely free to any consumer with a WiFi-capable PC and a toilet connected to a local municipal sewage system.”
Commenting on the project, Larry Page, co-founder and president, Google, said, "We've got that whole organizing-the-world's-information thing more or less under control. What's interesting, though, is how many different modalities there are for actually getting that information to you - not to mention from you."
Continuing in its serious vein, Google spoke about how data carriers have confronted the "last hundred yards" problem for delivering data from local networks into individual homes. Now, it claimed, to have successfully devised a "last hundred smelly yards" solution that takes advantage of preexisting plumbing and sewage systems and their related hydraulic data-transmission capabilities.
Users who sign up online for the TiSP system would receive a full home self-installation kit, which includes a spindle of fiber-optic cable, a TiSP wireless router, installation CD and setup guide. Home installation is a simple matter of GFlushing the fiber-optic cable down to the nearest TiSP Access Node, then plugging the other end into the network port of your Google-provided TiSP wireless router.
Coming to the second prank, the company announced its intention to launch Gmail Paper. With this, a Gmail user could request a physical copy of any message with the click of a button, and the company would send it through snail mail.
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