Skittles' Colorful, Clearly Drug-Induced, Never-Ending Wacky Website

Friday, February 5th, 2010

MG Siegler is a general partner at CrunchFund and a columnist for TechCrunch, where he has been writing since 2009. His focus is on Apple. Prior to TechCrunch, MG covered various technology beats for VentureBeat. Originally from Ohio, MG attended the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, MI. He’s previously lived in Los Angeles where he worked in Hollywood and in... → Learn More

Say what you want about Skittles’ branding on the Internet, but at least it’s never boring. Following the decision last year to change the Skittles.com homepage into a Twitter Search page, which led to to things from racial slurs to pedophilia talk showing up, they’ve now redesigned again. And the result is once again interesting.

Titled “Experience The Rainbow,” Skittles.com is now a never-ending (it auto-refreshes to keep going as you scroll down) page of trippy, odd, and colorful images. For example, the first image is a clown dressed as an astronaut. As you keep scrolling down, you get a mixture of this weird stuff alongside fairly clever marketing and statistics for the candy. As a weird sumo wrestling graphic shows, Skittles currently has over 3,600,000 fans on Facebook, but only 272 followers on Twitter (because they just started their Twitter account yesterday along with this website).

In fact, the entire site is clearly a ploy to gain more Facebook and Twitter followers. As you scroll, the one constant is the ability to hop over to Skittles’ Twitter or Facebook page at anytime. Also, each entry has a Facebook, Twitter, and email link to easily share any item. And the ploy appears to be working, as there is no shortage of talk on Twitter about the new site.

The wackiness even goes so far as to include a bunch of ASCII art images in the HTML source code for the page.

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Twitter, founded by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams in March 2006 (launched publicly in July 2006), is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to post their latest updates. An update is limited by 140 characters and can be posted through three methods: web form, text message, or instant message. The company has been busy adding features to the product like Gmail import and search. They recently launched a new site section called “Explore” for...

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