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PROVO -- No, despite what you may have seen on Facebook, you are probably not Barack Obama's fourth cousin. It's just the Provo-based company Familylink.com having a little fun.
"I thought, 'You know, we've got 34-some-odd million users, and it would be a prime opportunity just to have a little fun with our users and let them know they're related to someone,'" explained John McGowan, the company's chief social officer.
McGowan says they sent the notification to roughly 19 million people through the "We're Related" application saying they were related to the president. It was an elaborate scheme too.
If you clicked on that pedigree, you were quickly told it was just a joke. As with any prank, reactions were, let's just say, mixed.
"A lot of people, you could tell, they were [saying], 'Oh, you got me. I can't believe you got me. This is actually a good one.' Some people, bloggers and stuff, wrote, 'This is serious genealogy. We can't believe you had this written up. This is not right,'" McGowan said.
He says a few million people fell for the joke and his company's site has seen hundreds of thousands of unique visits because of it.
E-mail: pnelson@ksl.com
