Skittles.com Goes Social

Abandoning its old website, Skittles has thrown convention out the door to embrace social media. And by embrace I mean a full on unembarrassed bear hug. Other than nutritional and contact information all the rest is user generated.

Home page – Twitter stream
Video page – Youtube
Pics page – Flickr
Friends page – Facebook

Being well acquainted with the internet, I’m familiar with these services. What about the non-geeks out there? Will they get it?

From a design standpoint there is not much to it. The homepage is nothing more than a navigation box over the Skittles Twitter stream. My only complaint is the navigation gets in the way… even when it is minimized.

I’m not going to dwell on the design though. The real story is Skittles realization that what they have to say is less important than what others are saying. Once all the buzz fades from this dynamic move, I wonder how much attraction their site will have. Only time will tell.

This may be the start of a new trend from faceless mega-corps. Tell me what you think.

Google Joins Twitter

Google (@google) joined Twitter about 4 hours ago and posted its first message.

“I’m 01100110 01100101 01100101 01101100 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01101100 01110101 01100011 01101011 01111001 00001010″ – about 4 hours ago from web

For those of you that don’t speak binary, it says “I’m feeling lucky“.

This just goes to show you how big of a force Twitter has become when Google feels it necessary to set up an account. I wonder how long it will be before Google buys Twitter.

PR Stunt? Google Penalizes Google

For those of you who don’t know, Google slapped Google Japan in the penalty box. Why you ask? Because Google Japan dared to venture into the dark world of paid posting.

The big wigs at Google High Command frown on bloggers making money by doing paid posting. Probably because they haven’t yet figured out how to get a piece of the paid posting pie.

This all started when Google Japan signed an agreement with a marketing company that allowed for paid posting. Well this would make Google a hypocrite wouldn’t it? Getting money for paid posting while publicly denouncing it.

Needless to say the users of Google Japan were pretty upset with the hypocrisy. So what does Google do? It publicly announces that they are penalizing Google Japan.

How you ask? They dropped their PageRank from 9 down to a measly PageRank of 5, and it dropped its value as a trusted source.

What! Is that it?

You have to be kidding me. For starters PageRank is not a very meaningful metric. The PageRank that is displayed in toolbars across the web is not… I repeat… is not the same as the complex internal ranking Google uses internally.

Does this mean that when you search Google on Google Japan that they fell in rankings? I doubt it. Besides the user is already using Google so who cares.

The penalty is no real penalty. I’m concerned that this is nothing more than a PR stunt to put fear in the heart of bloggers about writing paid postings.

What about a real penalty? Maybe the head of Google Japan should step down. Maybe they should fire the lawyers that let it slip through. Maybe they should disallow doing business with the marketing company.

There is a lot Google can do, but simply dropping their PageRank by 4 points isn’t anything more than a PR stunt.

Tell me what you think about this.

Facebook TOS Goes Full Circle

Three days ago The Consumerist started quite an uproar when they notified the world of Facebook changing their terms of service significantly without notifying anyone. Before the change the rights to all the good stuff you uploaded expired when you deleted it. After the change, Facebook owned you. Well at least your content… Forever.

“You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof.”

Needless to say, this made Facebook users pretty unhappy. Complaints were logged across the internet in an unorganized grassroots campaign to stop Facebook’s stupidity.

Facebook CEO speaks out

This takes us to Monday the day after the news broke. Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg took the time to dance around the topic in his blog. He tried using flawed logic to explain the changes, and gave his word that they wouldn’t do anything wrong with your data.

“In reality, we wouldn’t share your information in a way you wouldn’t want. The trust you place in us as a safe place to share information is the most important part of what makes Facebook work. Our goal is to build great products and to communicate clearly to help people share more information in this trusted environment.”

Facebook backtracks

It didn’t take more than a day before Mark Zuckerberg announced on his blog that the terms of service were going to be changed back to what they were originally. He also welcomed input on a future change to their terms of service from the community.

Learn from Facebook

The good thing about others making mistakes is it gives us a chance to learn from them without the public humiliation. Facebook forgot to appreciate its community. Your visitors are your customers. Treat them accordingly.

In all this mess Facebook did a really good thing. They quickly corrected the mistake. There is nothing worse than dragging out a problem and ruining your reputation before fixing your mistake.

What else can we learn from Facebook’s debacle?