http://blog.wolfire.com/2009/03/skittlr-taste-the-marketing/
I am not sure if you guys are familiar with the recent Skittles.com sensation. Basically, Skittles made national news and caused a huge stir online by changing their homepage from a traditional site to literally nothing but a palette of links to their Facebook, Twitter, etc.
The other day, I was getting coffee with my roommate and we were talking about Skittles’ site. Looking past all of the hype it generated since they were the first massive brand to do this (and because people were vandalizing their wikipedia page, etc.), it is actually a really good idea. We maintain a number of “web presences”: Facebook, ModDB, Steam, Twitter, and YouTube.
Each of these is valuable in a number of different ways. Our main page, Overgrowth, is pretty (thanks to Aubrey’s awesome art) but it is a little limited. You can go there, look at some cool OG stuff, but that’s it. On the other hand, our Facebook page, for instance, lets people spread the word about our game to their friends very easily and our ModDB page reaches thousands of gamers every time we update it.
The problem is that each one is probably equally important, and it is really ugly and not very user friendly to just have a wall of links sending people to them. Our YouTube description is out of control. Enter Skittlr.
Last weekend, I whipped up a web app on Google App Engine called Skittlr. It is very simple. It basically lets anyone create their very own fancy link widget in about 15 seconds. Here’s an example of one: http://www.skittlr.com/overgrowth
I did the initial burst of code this weekend as kind of a proof of concept and now my roommate is going to take over and hopefully add a lot of cool features and themes.
Feel free to make your own Skittlr site here! Here are a couple of other cool ones: Sites that end with R" http://www.skittlr.com/r and recursion: http://www.skittlr.com/recursion