The only problem is, they’re doing it wrong, and they made a damn mess of it.

When I first heard the concept, I was very excited. I’m a huge fan of an openly social web, where the opinions and facts from people all over the world can help shape a brand. It’s clearly the direction the web is going, and a natural evolution from the early days of product reviews and recommendations.

As soon as I went to the site, however, I was repulsed, as it’s the laziest, most confusing implementation that I ever could have imagined. Completely different from what I was expecting, in every way.

The problem is they let the social content be the site. The Skittles site pulls in random social media pages (I’ve seen it pull Facebook and Wikipedia personally) in the background, while placing some ugly, huge floating nav over the top of the site. You can’t move this nav, you can’t hide it, and depending on which site it decides to pull, it can block the content behind it.

It feels like someone put this site together in about five minutes, not taking into account anything related to user experience, usability, or anything that a professional web architect should think of. It feels like a cheap viral marketing campaign, and yet it’s their entire web presence. Quite frankly, I’m grossed out.

Now, what’s the point in bitching if I’m not offering solutions, right? Well, here’s a solution, here’s what I was hoping the Skittles.com site would represent before I clicked on the link. Social commentary should help shape a site, you can pull in content and display it in a personalized, custom layout, without it actually being the site. How about you have a nice, branded Skittles page, and you have different feed boxes where you can pull Facebook’s fan page comments into, or a twitter feed. There are many handy tools for RSS parsing, and more.

So while I completely love the concept, the execution of this Skittles site is worrying. It’s going to put a bad spin on having companies use social commentary in an official setting, and to me that feels like a step backwards.

Just recently have I come to understand the full benefit of professional networking. Although I frequently have desired to go to conferences, in actuality I have only been able to go to one – Refresh 06, and that was only because it was a local event. I nearly made it to FOWD last year, but got horribly sick the morning of and was never able to make it out.

Since then, and quite recently actually, I have started to get back into the professional networking vibe. Thanks to people like Charlie O’Donnell, who runs NextNY, I have started to see the real benefits of professional networking. Just tonight I went to a NextNY ShakeShack event, and it was a lot more productive and fun than I had imagined. I’m sitting here now with a bunch of awesome business cards, all from smart, talented people in the industry. We shot ideas, talked technical, and a grand time was had by all.

So all of this brings me back to why I want to win the Golden Ticket. I want it because professional networking opens my eyes to ideas I never would have thought of otherwise. Hearing about new technologies and methods for creating innovative websites is one of the most important things in my career. It’s so refreshing to be around other people who work in the industry, who know the challenges we face as web professionals.

Right now in my career, I’m being very gung-ho about digging into this stuff as much as I can; learning all I can and making awesome sites that will hopefully help people be more productive and have access to a wider range of informaton. In order to be the best at what I do, I need to constantly learn about new technologies, and nothing helps better than going to conferences; for you get 2 in 1 – education and networking.

So please, leave your comments and help me win the ticket!

It is knowing this that I find myself addicted to the newest in a long line of blogging sites, Tumblr. According to Tumblr, “If blogs are journals, tumblelogs are scrapbooks.”

And they really are. With preset post settings for blogs, pictures, video, quotes, links, and chat transcripts, it is the ultimate quick blogging tool, allowing for a freedom to create spontaneous, quirky posts. It’s like Twitter, or Pownce, but with a little more sustenance – and a lot less of a dependency on social interaction.

In fact, the lack of a solid social angle is the one thing about this site that has underwhelmed me. I’m not quite clear if being social was a primary goal of the development process, or merely an afterthought, because the social interaction the site has is weak at best. With no comment system or friend browsing (you have to know their url beforehand to find them), finding friends on such a young site can prove to be difficult. Maybe that’s not such a bad thing, as the ease of making random friends was the main reason many social networks crap out in my eyes (Pownce and Virb, I’m talking to you).

So I think I’ll keep my little scrapbook blog for a while. Since this site is essentially my ‘on the record’ web identity, it will be nice to have somewhere ‘off the record’ to post pieces of my digital life. You can check out my ‘tumblelog’ at http://rauenzahner.tumblr.com/