Trey's website Prankdialer.com hits the front page of Digg

Trey's too busy to tell you about it, so I'm giving this a stab . . . According to Wikipedia:

"Rickroll is an Internet meme involving Rick Astley's music video for his song "Never Gonna Give You Up". In a rickroll, a person provides a link they claim is relevant to the topic at hand which actually takes the user to the Astley video. By May 2007, the practice had become widespread, and it eventually began to receive some coverage in the mainstream media."

About 2 weeks ago, using the original technology from his site, www.wheresmycellphone.com Trey spun off the Rickroll phenomena and built a new site called www.prankdialer.com. A user enters a phone number of a friend (or foe) on his site, and they receive a 30 second call that plays the Rickroll tune. The recipient then exclaims loudly, "Dang, I just got Rickrolled, ha, ha, ha!"

Trey was paying .03 per call but making more than that with GoogleAds on his site when the hits began to skyrocket. He was averaging an income of about $50 - $100 per day. A reporter interviewed him yesterday for an article for the University of Nebraska-Lincoln campus paper. She said that his Rickroll prank has taken over the campus.

Trey realized that he had to figure out a way to reduce the call costs so he spent the last 48 hours (with about 3 hrs of sleep) setting up a server to process the calls - thousands of them every hour - so now instead of paying 3 cents per call he's paying just .0008 or something. The amazing thing to me is that he figured out how to do all this. He had to learn PBX and VoiceOver IP, and computer coding, and setting up a computer to act as a server with multiple trunks so that if one avenue is busy the calls get made by the next trunk, and international calls and a do not call list so we don't all end up in jail. Lots of technology that is outside his normal "visual communications" skill set. But he got it all done just in time for -

April Fools! To add to the craziness, if you click on ANY video on YouTube today, you see the Rickroll video. It's YouTube's little April Fools joke, but as you know, if YouTube is doing it, it ain't so little. Also, people are adding Trey's site as a favorite on Digg.com If your number of Diggs exceeds 1,200 and your website appears on the home page of Digg, you've made it in the internet world. As I write this, at 3pm on April Fools, his server is now maxed out and making about 20 calls a second. So the man is making bank on google ads - right now he's at $560 income for the day and we're hoping he tops $1,000 by midnight. Of course April Fools will be higher than most, but you do the math to figure out the potential income rolling in 7 days a week, it's pretty exciting! And when Rickroll dies, there will undoubtedly be some other stupid song or saying around the corner. Go Trey, go!

PS - if you want to try it out, please wait until it's not April Fools day. The traffic and call volume is overwhelming the site today so some calls don't go through.