• Share this on Facebook
• Post on Google Buzz
• Share this on LinkedIn
• Tweet This!

Skittles is back, having pulled the plug on its ballsy social media experiment of yielding its brand homepage to the tweeple. No doubt they enjoyed a good amount of press coverage through this bold act to promote the undercurrent of social media conversations to such a position. But it was a little simple to think that there aren’t factions out there that marvel at the challenge to override it with spam. Regardless, it was a well worthy attempt and I was pleasantly surprised by the more guarded but fun-loving re-design – but not because they found a great way to integrate Social into their brand… that they didn’t…

If you are like myself, you probably landed on skittles.com and had a “taste” of the rainbow. To realize that the page is effectively endless… that is cool, even though it made me feel daft for a second.

No, what really caught my was in the HTML source code. Now I look a this stuff day in day out and always in delighted of beautiful semantic HTML markup. Skittles did a good job, but low and behold… ASCII ART. Love it.

While SEO best practices calls for the discipline to code sparingly to achieve results, in this instance who cares! I think its brilliant that while Skittles made quite a u-turn in embracing social media without borders, it had enough fun-loving within its DNA to give us source-code inspecting geeks a reason to enjoy this tedious task…

ASCII art is seriously treasured skill, I’ve spent quite a while in the past both testing how ASCII art could be incorporated into natural search meta data (tip: it mostly fails) and looking for such practitioners for some viral marketing.