New Skittles Twitter homepage not so sweet

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 2 Mar 2009 at 16:21

American confectionary firm Mars may rue its decision to hand over the Skittles homepage to a Twitter feed, following a barrage of abusive tweets from pranksters.

Typing Skittles.com into your address bar now takes you to a Skittles Twitter feed, which amalgamates all the tweets containing the word Skittles on to one page. All the customary website functionality, including contact and product information, is now handled by a garish purple widget that hovers in the corner of the screen.

Bravely, and perhaps somewhat recklessly, the site seems to be unmoderated, resulting in a succession of tweets that most certainly won't be appearing in Skittles adverts any time soon.

"Eating more than eight purple Skittles in one sitting can lead to cancer," reads one Tweet appearing high on the company's homepage.

"My little brother choked to death on a skittle exactly two years ago today," another prankster writes.

The Twitter switch, as one poster notes, seems to have "opened up the brand so we can all deface it."

That said it's clear the move has increased brand awareness, with numerous commentators congratulating the company on a bold piece of marketing. Indeed, the term Skittles has already shot to the top of Twitter's trend list.

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