Well, the cat’s out the bag, the skeleton’s out the closet, the beans have been spilled…and all other truth-revealing metaphors you care to think of.

We wrote earlier today that blur Group is disrupting the status quo. That part, at least, is true.

But Father, we have sinned. We did a naughty and told a little white lie.

We announced earlier today that Forbes had named blur Group as one of the 25 most disruptive companies in 2011. Well, Forbes did no such thing – we made the whole thing up from beginning to end.

But if you’re listening Mr. Forbes, it would be fantastic if you would pull together such a list, we would love to get your take on who all the big game-changers are.

Meanwhile, back at the ruse…

So anyway, we secured ourselves the domain name www.forbes-disrupt.com, and our Lead Designer did a pretty good job of fooling everyone. Many of our employees were even convinced that Forbes had nominated l’il ol’ blur Group ahead of Groupon, Spotify, Facebook, Twitter, Skype and Amazon. We were careful not to be too obvious though, which is why Apple and Google squeezed in just ahead of us.

So why would we engage in such tomfoolery? Well, look at your watch, scan today’s newspaper or glance at your Page 3 Sun Wall Calendar. It’s March the 31st…happy ‘the-day-before-April-Fool’s-Day!

We had been planning on keeping this big-fat, bare-faced lie boiling over onto the big day itself, but we’re doubled-over here at blur Group HQ and the pain is too much. We need release, and the only way we can do that is by ‘fessing up. Oh, and we like breaking records too, we want to lay claim to the world’s first April Fool’s Day prank in 2011, and we’re pretty sure we beat Australia to the claim given that we started leaking the story late afternoon yesterday.

But there’s more to this than a simple inability to control our sense of self-satisfaction – we simply don’t like convention.

To hell with the rulebooks…

We love books in general, but we’re not a big fan of rule-books. We’re already tearing up the traditional Madison Avenue rulebook, so we thought we’d tear up the April Fool’s rulebook too and celebrate a day early.

Social media, flying penguins and spaghetti harvests

We’ve had a bit of fun today, and we hope you see the funny side. It has been an interesting experiment, watching the buzz unfold through our social media channels in real-time. But a special mention must go out to all those who spotted the ruse from the start, we tip our giant blur Group hat to you.

You can expect to see many more pranks unfolding across the web tomorrow – even in the most respected of publications.

The BBC has always been game for a laugh, dreaming up ditties such as this one about a colony of flying penguins:

Thanks to social media, this prank went viral within minutes of launch. But the BBC has been playing annual pranks on the nation long before YouTube, Facebook and Twitter came along.

The Swiss Spaghetti Harvest from 1957 is a particularly memorable prank, and it that had the whole nation talking. How did it spread? Well, there were only a few TV channels then, so millions watched it and then told all their friends about it – word-of-mouth, literally.

We look forward to seeing what the BBC and all the others have in store for us tomorrow.