Terminator Salvation expands Skynet to your desktop

Viral marketing is the nirvana that just about every company is looking to achieve these days. There are some good attempts and then there are some that drop with a dull thud. Usually they involve websites related in some fashion to the product trying to gain market share or some cutesy video that generally just wants to make you gag.

Terminator Salvation though look to have raised the stakes in their marketing campaign that they have been building on slowly in the lead up to the movie’s release. The most recent move in this campaign according to Alex Billington at FirstShowing.net has been the release of the Skynet Distributed Computing Platform (DCP).

Yup you heard that right – you can now download an application that will link in with every other computer in the world running the DCP. The application is located on the Warner Brothers servers (probably due to legalities) and you have to agree to the terms of service that come with the application, so as Alex suggests this might not be something to do at work.

Alex as well has a bit of a lowdown on what exactly the DCP does at this point which really doesn’t seem to be all that much

Once you launch the application, it shows you two primary views, one of the entire world with little yellow dots indicating where each computer that is connected to Skynet’s DCP is located. You can also click on the odd yellow/green graph in the lower left corner and it brings up another new display with more information. Also found in the lower right corner a section that says “Input Code” and a space for 9 characters. We’re guessing there is some code that can be entered here, but I have no clue where to find this or what’ll happen when you put it in. Any ideas? If you’re into this viral, I’d suggest you download this right away!

It’s interesting to see just how far some of these marketing folks will go to get our attention but given that the movie is already going to be insanely popular one has to wonder if all this extra stuff is worth the time and effort.

[picture of DCP courtesy of FirstShowing.net]

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