It’s always exciting to see brands being brave which is true of the newly relaunched Skittles website – http://www.skittles.com/

It’s a really nice example of a quick to produce/cost effective solution that leverages different social media sites, all linked together through a really simple primary navigation/promo space box that floats in the top left corner of each section/site you navigate to.

Their ‘homepage’ and ‘products’ pages are actually their www.wikipedia.org page, their ‘chatter’ section of the site is the brand’s twitter page, the ‘friends’ section of the site links through to their Facebook fan-page, and their ‘media’ section links through to their YouTube & Flickr pages.

This is a fantastic approach that intelligently leverages existing consumer and brand generated content, bringing together communities of brand advocates.

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It’s another great example of brands needing to be increasingly brave and letting go of some control, as true brand ownership shifts to sit with consumers. Skittles recognises that they can only participate in these conversations.

It’s a huge step for a brand – nice one Team Skittles!

Do you Poken? Now this might seem a little bit cutsey and there might be an easier way to do this… but still. Little RFID chips in these toys swap social networking information (or any contact details) when you Hi-Five them, you then plug them into your computer device thing and manage the level of engagement you want to have with that person. You could do it other ways sure, but the interaction seems nice. Grown up applications to come. Via: Springwise

PSFK recently ran their Good Ideas in 2009 in Digital seminar in New York.

Full of inspiration and food for thought of what is and what will be, it is definitely worth a watch

But, if you don’t have a spare hour up your sleeve, we have prepared the 60 sec snapshot for you

Virtual Identity

You are no longer really in control of your digital destiny. Aggregating tools and the move from search to findability, your digital identity is not only made up of what you have created for people to see (active collaborations) but also what you have done (passive collaborations). Something you may want to remember when you next consider time you look for yourself on Hot or Not.

For the voyuerists amongst us, there is My First Tweet which looks at people’s first week of using Twitter and gives us a window into how people start using new digital channels - who tests the waters & who dives in head first.

And for the digital show ponies amongst us – lifestreaming. Check out Storytlr – a tool which aggregates all your social media activities

The analog & digital worlds

Once considered warring parties where ultimately in a battle for supremacy, digital would come up trumps, we are now seeing them coming together and beautiful things are happening.

Take the Wii or Guitarhero – these let us to interact with the digital world in an analog way – it makes sense to our engrained behaviors and as creatures of comfort, it was always destined for love at first swing / strum.

Mobile internet

The mobile web is finally taking off and it is succeeding by pulling the web apart, apps let us find exactly what we need, when we need it – whether that is a recommendation for the best pizza with 100m and how to get there or something cool to watch while we are waiting for the bus.

A little while ago we completed a small project called “CBA Webolution Phase 1″which meant we did a quick refresh of the personal banking section of a new up and coming bank who you may of heard of before, The Commonwealth Bank of Australia, anyone? No? Didn’t think so. Anyway they seemed to like the pixel polishing we did for them so they asked us to work on another project called “CBA Webolution Phase 2″ No problems, easy, should knock that one off on a Monday morning before lunchtime. Right?

(Puts joke aside)

Seriously now. Wow. 12 months later and several lifetimes of work have been lovingly poured into the redevelopment of CBA’s Business and Corporate banking sections. And it shows. Top, top work from all those in the agency who touched this project with extra hat tips to Matt, Kathleen, Ellie, Mike, Fabulous, Luke, Jamie, Penn… and (thank god for blogs as I will have to update this list several times). I hope everyone involved feels all warm and tingly, because it really is a massive achievement. Well done guys!

Now this is something remarkable, MTV is getting back into (gasp) MUSIC, by posting every music video in its archive. Looks like the “Hulu halo” is finally making its way into the music video business.

The good part for all web/blog-o-philes? They are embeddable too! So now, when you blog and you make a David Bowie music video reference, you can embedd it… In High Quality!

See it all go down here: http://www.mtvmusic.com/

Now the only thing that I missed is the possibility to create a playlist… How can we party without one?

The iTunes App store where you can download/buy new apps for your iPhone has turned into a boonaza for small time developers who armed with good idea now have platform that can propel them in supedevstardom . And along with the fame comes the money, small time success stories are talking about profits of $250, 000 in two months. The full story from Wired.

Mark Pesce’s keynote at WebDirections South

If a picture paints a thousand words, you’ve just absorbed a million, the equivalent of one-and-a-half Bibles. That’s the way it is, these days. Nothing is small, nothing discrete, nothing bite-sized. Instead, we get the fire hose, 24 x 7, a world in which connection and community have become so colonized by intensity and amplification that nearly nothing feels average anymore.

His key points:

• what happens when we break free from Dunbar’s Number
• the most useful tool any of us could have, moving forward into this future, is a social contextualizer
• the rise of Anarcho-syndicalism, a system with no hierarchy, no bosses, no secrets, no politics
• we behave like crowds when we really ought to be organizing like a community.

Mark’s been kind enough to share the transcript.

Is NCF the next missing link?

Wiki: Near Field Communication or NFC, is a short-range high frequency wireless communication technology which enables the exchange of data between devices over about a 10 centimetre (around 4 inches) distance.

Kinda like a mash-up between a RFID Chip and a smart card but a little bit smarter than that. Locally Telstra and NAB have been working with it to develop contactless mobile payments (here). You know buy some “stuff” at the “supermarket” and instead of using your “plastic” to “pay” for it, you just “swipe” your “phone” past their “thing” and hey-ho you’ve just “paid” for it. Now it can go a little bit further than this as people have been using the technology in smart posters, so the user just waves their phone past the poster and “holy-digital-content-delivery-system-Batman”

Hat Tip: Rubbishcorp

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

Introducing Ubiquity for Firefox, and experiment in connecting the Web with language. labs.mozilla.com/2008/08/introducing-ubiquity/

Ubiquity’s goals are to:

Empower users to control the web browser with language-based instructions. (With search, users type what they want to find. With Ubiquity, they type what they want to do.)

Enable on-demand, user-generated mashups with existing open Web APIs. (In other words, allowing everyone (not just Web developers) to remix the Web so it fits their needs, no matter what page they are on, or what they are doing.)

Use Trust networks and social constructs to balance security with ease of extensibility.

Extend the browser functionality easily