Skittles

Skittles have been all the rage on Twitter the past day or so since the company relaunched their website by merging social media content from Wikipedia, Youtube, twitter, flickr and other sites. Some more savy web users have been able to cobble together a version of this concept by tying together sites like linkedin, slideshare, blogger, flickr, etc to establish a web profile or presence (and all for free without the expense of web development or hosting); however, this commercial extention appears to be unique. Whether unique or not this effort has tapped into the phenomenon of web-based social interaction to such an extent that twitter users were blaming skittles for the service disruptions on twitter yesterday.

Visit www.skittles.com and here is a take from the LA TImes:

The updated website is little more than a small overlay that links to user-submitted information about the candy on various social media sites: photos of candy wrappers on Flickr, videos from the company's YouTube channel, the Facebook fan page, its Wikipedia entry and real-time conversation on Twitter.

Upon loading Skittles.com, the visitor is asked to enter a date of birth as an agreement to the no-holds-barred information flow. A Twitter search for "skittles" is the default landing page, displayed in the background.

Putting the micro-blogging website at the forefront has apparently paid off. "Skittles" has topped Twitter's list of trending topics since last night.