Head over to Skittles.com and you'll notice it's replaced its entire homepage with its Twitter stream, reports Mashable. "The only thing that's left is a widget-like navigation console in the upper left part of the screen, but lo and behold: instead of pointing you to some company PR nonsense, it sends you to the Skittles entry on other popular social destinations: Wikipedia, YouTube, Flickr." Not surprisingly, the site change is getting a lot of tweets. "'Skittles' has been the number one search topic on Twitter and in social media since Sunday, and as you might expect, most commentators love it," writes The Responsible Marketing Blog. "It's bold, innovative and it's helping drive word of mouth regarding the Skittles brand with people who love to share ideas." PardonMyFrench has five reasons why the redesign is a "brilliant" marketing move, including "How often are you going to Tweet how great the greens are? Sure they could be taking a beating today from so called marketing gurus, but after the first few days blow over, they'll have Twitters world wide generating content for them." "I think you'll agree that some people might have Twittered, not because they love the candy (I'll take Starburst any day)," writes MooneyThinks.com, "but to see their commentary front and center on the homepage. With the speed of Twitter, that might just be their 1/15 of a second of fame."

Of course, some Twitter users are abusing their fame privileges. "Skittles has given up anything that even remotely looks like control here," writes Writing Roads. "Right, but Mars doesn't care what people say about its product, specifically," says Gawker. Everyone knows what Skittles taste like, and every bag is exactly the same. The company just wants people hearing 'Skittles this' and 'Skittles that' over and over again until they haul their butts down to the corner store or office vending machine." Yet SearchViews says there's a "massive lost opportunity for Skittles here" because the company doesn't have its own Twitter account: "Rather than Twittering in the voice of the 'sour man' who determines if someone can have sour Skittles, or directing folks to a Skittles 'tailor' fan page on Facebook, they have some fairly generic profiles (and none at all on Twitter)." VentureBeat calls it either a sign of Twitter's ongoing transition to the mainstream or of a candy company's epic laziness. Then again, would you even be interested in following Skittles on Twitter if they hadn't launched this new site? Let us know in the comments.