Skittles.com : Interesting take on information architecture

Skittles.com has a new online experience to check out.  This is the 2nd time i've personally seen this type of information design in place, the other time i saw this was on Modernista's web site. I guess imitation is the best form of flattery.  In short it's using social sites on the web to host their content. So friends of Skittles are on Facebook, videos are on YouTube. The main page their navigation sits on is Twitter. It's pulling in everyone who's talking about Skittles, which is pretty cool. Products are hosted on Wikipedia.   This is still an interesting approach.  Outside of this you can't help but realize that there are many ways for a brand to utilize social sites (Other than the obvious ways) and utilize their benefits.

Breaking the desktop paradigm

For so long we've all worked within some pretty traditional constructs of what we call our desktops - whether on a Mac, PC, Linux or Commodore 64. We've all worked with the basic file structures and architectures that compose our virtual working/living world on our computers and how we interface with them.

With advancing web technologies and continually evolving interface design we've certainly seem some breakthroughs but they have mostly been at the site or application level, not on our day-to-day computer desktops. Neither OS X or Windows Vista have evolved things that much. That is until now (or soon hopefully).

Check out Bumptop. Designed by Anand Agarawala. BumpTop represents a paradigm shift in how we can think about our virtual desktops and allow them to become more intuitive and more important productive. Not to mention it's about as cool as you could imagine! While this is in beta now, follow it's development and sign up for a beta as the developer gets closer. I for one am hopeful to get a sneak peek!