Tuesday, April 01, 2008

April Fools... You've Been Rick Rolled!

April Fool's Day, 2008

On April 1, 2008 (April Fools' Day), all YouTube Featured Videos hyperlinked to the Rickroll. The prank began with international YouTube portals before affecting the main site.[13] In addition, LiveJournal announced on the same day that they would be adding a new member to their Advisory Board, linking members to the journal "rickastley", which contains a Rickroll.[14] Also, on the same day, Isohunt had the Rick Astley video instead of their normal frontpage, as did LyricWiki.org. Popular gaming website Kongregatealso claimed to have finally launched its upcoming card game Kongai, only to leave its players not with the game, but being rickrolled. Also on the same day, the Mahalo Daily video podcast hosted by Veronica Belmont produced a Rickroll purporting to be an interview with Steve Jobs. Media search engine SeeqPod included an mp3 of "Never Gonna Give You Up" as the top hit for all searches. Gamefaqs.com's Poll of the Day featured only nonsense answers drawn from the song's lyrics.

In episode 17 of the music review podcast Have You Heard, while discussing Rick Astley's reaction to rickrolling, the hosts play clips of the song effectively rickrolling their audience.

The website Fark featured a link to a video claiming to be a blooper reel for the Muppets but instead linked to a video of Beaker performing Rick Astley's song. Other social bookmarking sites like Digg and Reddit subsequently joined in linking the video.

The blog The Church of Joe featured a story on the supposed release of Frog in a Blender 2 by JoeCartoon, but Rickrolled it's visitors with the links.

The online web store Think Geek advertised on their front page a Betamax to HD-DVD converter device. In the product page a demonstration video was linked which was, in actuality, a Rickroll.







Click on this Blog entry title for more information on the Rickroll Phenomena

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