Well, that just about wraps it up for the Skittles

[spatch]

Before I fell off the Cliff of Consciousness last night, I remarked that the Skittles stunt page may have accomplished something none-too-shabby: its little Using Twitter As Its Front Page getup managed to cull a swift cross-section of the Internet, from the trolls to the profane howler monkeys to the "let me get in on this" self-promoters to the misguided people who really were trying to enjoy the frontpage for what it was, whatever it was. As I drifted off to sleep I thought you know, there might be something to this, and that I might actually be correct in this observation. By light of day, I see that I am indeed vindicated.

The Skittles people attracted the last element of the Internet: the exploiter. There's an account on Twitter now called "skittles_com" which sends out nothing but previously posted Skittles comments with their own URL attached at the end. The URL obstensibly goes to one of those "FREE LAPTOP!!!!*" schemes (where the * stands for "if you buy our stuff" or "spam your friends" or both) and is clearly not M&M/Mars' doing.

This is brilliant. This completes the circle.

Skittles takes Twitter's page, branding and all, and uses it for its own nebulous purposes.

This leads someone else to take the name of Skittles, branding and all, and use it for their own referral spam purposes.

The irony comes in several delicious fruit flavors.

In principle I'm pretty much opposed to all of this, but I do gotta give somebody here mad props for the quick capitalization on a capitalization.

Comments

[tenlegspider.livejournal.com]

It's still there, go the Chatter. The enterprising spammers seem to have been quickly stopped, though.

[minkrose]

awesome - thank you! I guess I wasn't willing to mess around with it enough to figure that out.