A 16-year-old web developer managed to rickroll Vine, breaching the social-video app's six-second upload limit in the process.
Cleveland resident Will Smidlein posted a Vine on Monday that included the more than three-minute-long music video, "Never Gonna Give You Up." The 1987 pop hit from singer Rick Astley (which we have embedded, above, for your viewing pleasure) has since become an online meme and form of bait-and-switch trolling.
I think I broke Vine.vine.co/v/b3gY2OnrgZn— Will Smidlein (@ws) June 3, 2013
Twitter eventually took down the lengthy Vine post, but not before it went viral. An engineer at Twitter had sent Smidlein a direct message earlier, asking him to remove the post, according to The Verge
Sorry, Twitter/Vine engineers. I tried to keep it quiet, but the internet never forgets.— Will Smidlein (@ws) June 3, 2013
And it got taken down.Oh well, it was fun being internet famous while it lasted. I’ll wait for them to patch then write a post-mortem.— Will Smidlein (@ws) June 3, 2013
Smidlein later expressed remorse for his prank on Twitter.
I truly feel awful for the engineers whose day I ruined with my stupid messing around.— Will Smidlein (@ws) June 3, 2013
The incident comes on the same day that Vine released its Android app. Now available in the Google Play Store, it runs on all Android devices running version 4.0 and higher.
What do you think of Vine's rickrolling episode? Should the app let users upload videos that are longer than six seconds? Discuss in the comments, below.