Skittles: Tweet the Rainbow

Skittles are those fruity, chewy candies that might remind you somewhat of M&M's in size and shape. Well, in what's either a clever viral marketing campaign or some nightmarishly sad idea bound for failure, Skittles has replaced its website, skittles.com, or relaunched it, rather, as its Twitter stream.

You got it, with the exception of a navigation widget, all you have on their front page is their Twitter stream, now.

Too bad Twitter is still having problems monetizing its service. This could be a gold mine if everyone did this.

When you go to the site (and every time you visit in a new browser session, mind you), you will have to fill in your birthday (see above, click to enlarge). Obviously, there could (and are!) be some tweets that you wouldn't want your kids to be looking at. Here's what the age verification window says:

Just a heads up: Any stuff beyond the Skittles.com page is actually another site and not in our control. This panel may be hovering over the page, but SKITTLES® isn't responsible for what other people post and say on these sites. Click the box below to acknowledge that you know SKITTLES® isn't responsible for that stuff.

And there are plenty of non-kid-friendly tweets, such as:

FrankVanRad: Skittles stabbed a puppy and r*ped a nun on the steps of a church.

By the way, the navigation widget doesn't take you to other parts of the site. Nope, it'll take you to Wikipedia (for stuff about the product), YouTube for Media (videos) and Flickr for Media (pics). "Contact" seems to be the exception.

It's definitely an novel idea, but will get boring quickly enough, once the novelty wears off. It's also not "totally" new, as it's a similar idea as the "site" of Modernista.

So, time to start a pool: how long before they go back to their normal webpage? If ever? Or will they move to a different sort of viral marketing campaign? Stay tuned.