twitter serendipity

I've written several times before about the power of randomness and serendipity to provide new information about a brand. Now that serendipity has made its way to SMS. Secret Message Service is a way for people to share secrets anonymously via text - sort of a PostSecret crossed with Twitter. Most of the responses have been in French (the site is run by a blogger in Paris) but one could easily see it spreading to English.

While not using the Twitter platform currently, this type of site brings up an interesting question - is it valuable to people in some situations to follow those they don't know, even if just out of curiosity?

Brands that will die

GM have announced that they will shutter the Pontiac brand. Obviously, the company needed to shutter some of its operations in order to survive and Pontiac's cars have always been lacking. But, then again, that is true of many of the GM brands. Which makes the choice of Pontiac a little surprising. Pontiac is the one of the strongest muscle car brands because it was accessible. People in the 1970's could go an get a Pontiac, work on it themselves and make it better. Not something that was ever true of Buick.

Pontiac will surely not be the last well known brand to die in this recession. in fact, here is a list of 12 more that financially, are about to topple.

Any other nominations?