Skittles on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube

Years from now, people will look back to the day Skittles ditched its flashy site and chose to load the top social websites that talk about it instead.

I can’t even begin to fathom how brilliant a campaign this is (despite being pioneered by Modernista exactly a year before). Maybe it’s not. I don’t know whether it’s so open-minded and fun, it doesn’t even look like a gimmick anymore or it’s just plain lazy to put the Skittles-related Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, and even Wikipedia pages right on Skittles.com.

The cynical

Why load tweets, photos, or videos if you can just pull them via the the sites’ ever-useful APIs and create a page that’s sprinkled with 100% more colors and candy? (Come on, don’t deprive web designers and developers of their jobs!)

Is it even legal for a company to load another company’s web page to promote itself? (But asking that is like saying Facebook owns whatever you post on its site, and we all know how that turned out.)

Is seeing yourself on Skittles.com enough incentive to build buzz about the product instead of the marketers who will be handsomely rewarded anyway? (A resounding yes if you’re one of those new media douchebags, but let’s get to that in a bit.)

Do these cynical questions even matter if you’re enjoying the experience anyway?

The self-absorbed

Skittles took a risk. Some other company would have been worried about the possibility of smack and smut polluting the streams.

It’s bound to happen anyway, if this campaign lasts long enough and the new media douchebags pounce on another pure phenomenon taking place. I think that’s what draws people to this experiment. It’s raw, unfiltered, and free from any sinister intentions. (At least to the naked eye.)

Remember when SEO hadn’t been invented? When Wikipedia was an unbiased reference? When Twitter was all about what you are doing right now? When your friends on Facebook didn’t have their own fan pages?

And what about the other side of that purity—the cold, hard, messy truth? Because it’s only a matter of time when Skittles, which is not just sweet, innocent, colorful candy, but also a huge corporation, rakes up some dirt in its dealings.

If there’s one thing to take away from all this is that if you’re a company and dreaming of pulling off something like this, it’s not about you. (Or maybe it is, but can you at least try to make it look like it isn’t?)

Any publicity is good publicity, order will emerge from chaos, and worry less about projecting a reality distortion field, focus more on making your product great, because it will speak for itself.

Modern computing in the age of the Internet is quite a strange, remarkable thing. As you sit hunched over your laptop at home watching a YouTube video or using a search engine, you’re actually plugging into the collective power of thousands of computers that serve all this information to you from far-away rooms distributed around the world. It’s almost like having a massive supercomputer at your beck and call, thanks to the Internet.

So yeah, cloud computing is THE thing today, and even big companies make use of global data center services to expand their operations. Recently, telecommunications giant NTT Communications announced a new venture wherein they would be using a cloud-based mobile service to analyze the eating habits of people, together with their exercise habits. The result of this analysis will be recommendations to help improve the health of the user.

The venture is being taken on in conjunction with NTT Resonant Inc. (an NTT affiliate) and foo.log Inc. Dubbed Health Enhancement Assist Service, it will require people to take photos of their food (using their mobile phones). The program will then analyze the photos to come up with estimated calorie content and nutritional value. The exercise part will come into play via calculation of how much the user walks within a day – not that different from a pedometer.

Whoever said that the Internet is simply for fun, useless applications can think again, right?

Photo via jhritz

Google brought back the 80s arcade game Pac Man to celebrate its 30th anniversary last May 22nd in the form of a fully-working Google Doodle on its homepage (it’s been since moved to a dedicated page where people can still play it). The “I’m feeling lucky” button gets replaced by “Insert coin” and clicking on it lets you play. Click on it a second time and Ms. Pac Man joins in the fun.

Apart from hearing collective 8-bit cheers of delight upon discovering what could be Google’s most viral web toy yet, the Pac Man doodle was another display of its massive influence, both the good and the bad.

The Good: HTML5 evangelizer

The Pac Man game was developed in HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. Granted, Flash was used for the sounds, but other than that, this was a triumph for web standards as there is no bigger stage, no bigger endorser on the Web than the Google homepage.

The Bad: Procrastination enabler

On the other hand, people are now questioning if Google should’ve put such a major distraction on what is supposed to be a tool for getting things done. RescueTime reports that as people spent several more time on the Google homepage to play the game, millions of hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars were wasted. I wouldn’t be surprised if lawsuits started popping up, blaming Google for allowing such a thing to happen.

“With great power comes great responsibility” or “Geeks just wanna have fun”?

I’m just glad Google still knows how to have fun depsite how big it’s grown. And due credit must be given to advocacies it gets behind. Two years ago it was Chrome, last week it was web fonts. The Pac Man doodle just happens in between these achievements.

It’s been a couple of years since the height of the “kill IE6″ web campaigns, and it took that long to hold a funeral that finally seals its fate.

Of course, the IE6 Funeral is an arbitrary event held by the Aten Design Group last March 4, and this doesn’t really eradicate the browser on computers that can’t upgrade.

Over at TechCrunch, commenter Jeff Carlson jokes: “So if someone uses IE6 to browse the web tomorrow, will their web browser be a Zomb-ie6 browser?” You could say that. After all, IE6 is way past its expiration date, sucking the brains out of web designers and developers with its buggy, unstable, insecure features from an ugly past.

Even Microsoft acknowledges it’s time for IE6 to go, as it actually sent over flowers and this note:

Thanks for the good times IE6, see you all @ MIX when we show a little piece of IE Heaven. The Internet Explorer Team @ Microsoft

On March 13, Google will end IE6 support on YouTube, following the March 1 pull-out for Google Docs and Google Sites. Gmail and Google Calendar are next on the list, slated by the end of the year.

Combined with the European government security warnings to upgrade browsers, could Google’s systematic phase-out be the final nail in the IE6 coffin, or is this slow death going to take at least another year?

I really hope this is it.

To commemorate the closing of internet dinosaur and free web hosting service Geocities today, October 26, geeky web comic XKCD “redesigned” its site to match the horrible aesthetic (or lack thereof) rampant during the ’90s. Low-fi images (including the requisite “under construction” sign), web-safe colors, <table>s, <blink>, <marquee>, a hit counter, and a “best viewed in Netscape Navigator” disclaimer—it’s all in there. I think the only thing missing is an actual comic about Geocities itself.

Is it safe to say we are finally rid of those horrible-looking and horribly-functioning things now that Geocities is gone? We will always have that side of the spectrum. But it’s a good reminder of how far we’ve come:

1. IE6 is now the most outdated browser instead of the most modern. (That doesn’t make its continued existence a good thing though.)
2. If you disable images and stylesheets, webpages will make sense.
3. Descriptive hyperlinks matter (mostly to curry favor with Google, but still).
4. Despite Yahoo!’s terrifying propensity to run its acquisitions to the ground (worried about Flickr and Delicious yet?), it’s easier and cheaper than ever to run your own website.

Still, the timeless adage remains: back up and be prepared! You never know when life will go Geocities on you.

There’s little else on each page except a rectangular area found dead-center, filled with icons representing the tons of new ways we can be contacted, befriended, stalked. We have the Web 2.0 era and all the insanely creative social media icon designers to thank for this phenomenon. (Sometimes blogs and other related sites are linked to in these cards, but who has time for those anymore?) If you don’t have the chops to whip up your own, services like Card.ly come to the rescue.

But that’s just the visual side of the metaphor being brought online. Business cards are meant to be exchanged because of the information they contain, so what good would these sites be without technological mojo? We have great frameworks like vCard, hCard, and perhaps the open identity systems like OpenID and oAuth. We also have companies working in the mobile space or have devices of their own (more here).

Then there are the lifestreaming apps, like FriendFeed, Tumblr, and chi.mp, which blur the lines between keeping one’s social accounts in one place and keeping up-to-date with said person at the same time.

How does one unassuming professional looking to establish an online presence actually choose from these possibilities? Social media evangelists pretty much recommend we get on everywhere, as many as and as much as we can help it. The goal is to be ubiquitous rather than obscure.

I have to wonder when we’ll ever reach true unification. Home phone. Work phone. Fax. Mobile phone. Email address. IM handle. Static homepage. Blog. MySpace page. Facbeook profile. LinkedIn profile. Facebook Fan Page. Twitter username. Then this—all of this.

How do you identify yourself offline and online? Do you pick one, or unload a bunch of URLs, aliases, and digits on your potential new client/drinking buddy/love-of-your-life? Is this whole business card business even a suitable metaphor, or yet another idea startups can cash in on? And we’re not even bringing up identity theft here.

One of the most ambitious efforts to come out of the Googleplex (or anywhere, really) in ages is Google Wave, a real-time messaging, sharing, and collaborating service unveiled last week. Finally, Google’s crack at the Real-Time Web. We’ve been waiting.

Google’s Real-Time Web

You might recall ReadWriteWeb proclaiming the big G missed the boat on that, as Twitter rules over real-time search these days. However, Wave makes one realize there is more to the real-time web than 140-character messages.

It’s a new way of doing things. It’s decentralized, open-source, and poised to take over online communications the way email has, since it’s built as a fundamental protocol. But it’s not even just “the new email”, it lets you do a lot more than that. It was built to service needs knowing the capabilities of the Web today:

Ezra Pound once wrote: “”The artist is always beginning. Any work of art which is not a beginning, an invention, a discovery is of little worth.” And elsewhere: “Make it new!”

Even more than the application itself, I love the way Wave doesn’t just build on what went before but starts over. In demonstrating the power of the shared, real-time information space, Jens and Lars show a keen understanding of how the cloud changes applications.

When I saw Wave for the first time on Monday, I realized that we’re at a kind of DOS/Windows divide in the era of cloud applications. Suddenly, familiar applications look as old-fashioned as DOS applications looked as the GUI era took flight. Now that the web is the platform, it’s time to take another look at every application we use today, and ask the same question Lars and Jens asked themselves: “What would this look like if we invented it today instead of twenty-five years ago?”

This is not another reboot of the social network format the way Google redid email with Gmail and redid search with Google Search. But it does feel this is the way social interactions on the Web were supposed to be. Aren’t you tired of signing up over and over for the hottest new web service, OpenID/etc. not withstanding?

I love the diversity and downright chaos of the Internet, but the future has got to be seamless integration between all things. Text, photos, videos, blog posts, polls, calendars, petitions, lyrics, jokes, LOLcats, whatever.

Now when Google says real-time, it means your friend’s message appears on your screen by the character, instead of a “your friend is typing…” notice as you twiddle your thumbs. It also means you can reply to any part of your friend’s message, edit any part of a document, and replay exactly how everything happened when you’re done. See video above. It’s brilliant.

Terrifying ramifications?

That’s barely scratching the surface. I’m not sure if the protocol will succeed—not everybody lives in real-time online, or can handle this many features (see Twitter).

If it does succeed, it might become too successful that users are addicted, possibly trapped in this real-time space. We continue to blur the line between the real and the virtual, and even if at this point we can tell the difference between the two, will we ever reach the point of being “too” connected, transparent, hyperreal?

I’m not even sure if we should be trust yet another invention from Google—there has to be something in it for them, right?

Are you terrified yet? I think I am, but I’m pretty excited too.

The idea behind this event is to promote Web Standards. Plain and simple. This includes proper use of (x)html, semantic markup, a good hierarchy structure, and of course, a good ‘ol play on words. It’s time to show off your <body>.

As an aside, I like that this ‘Day’ is arbitrarily stretched out to 48 hours instead of the usual 24 to accommodate locations all over the globe. I think more worldwide events and holidays should be more timezone-neutral.

We need more standards-focused advocacies like Blue Beanie Day, the countless kill IE6 websites, and this.

WaSP has also discovered that the best way to fight this malware is to ensure your websites are standards-compliant:

In order to ensure you do not fall victim to the worm’s botnet, I2SecC recommends immediate validation of the markup and supporting stylesheets for any Web site that you maintain and correcting any errors that are uncovered. As yet, it is unclear whether the worm will target sites that make use of non-standard DOM scripting; however, a message found by I2SecC researchers in an online forum believed to be from the worm’s creator or a close associate hints that it will: “your document.all are belong to us.”

April Fool’s! If only we could save the world from malware with web standards!

Conficker is very real, however, so please exercise caution today.

On Friday, November 28, standardistas all over the world shall unite to celebrate the 2nd Blue Beanie Day, an informal event promoting web standards and accessibility. Participants are invited to wear a blue beanie—like the one Jeffrey Zeldman wore on the cover of Designing With Web Standards—then snap a photo of themselves and share it with everyone.

You don’t even have to own a beanie though. It could be some other headgear variant, or even a Photoshop mockup! The idea is to bring people together and have fun by doing something outside of coding standards-compliant markup.

Join the Facebook event page and the Flickr group and post your photos there.