Google + X-Men = Nerdgasm

Excuse me for the crude title but I'm probably not exaggerating. Don't believe me? Check out the X-Planet site.

It's a promotion for the X-Men movie that combines Google Maps with mutant listing and tracking. Site let's you create your own mutant profile and find other persecuted mutants.

A great idea and very well executed, even with the slowness at times. Tie-in with the movie is tight and gives you a great immersive feel (Check out events and watch the integration, brilliant!). I'm surprised at the low number of registered users though (less than 4k at my visit).

That makes me wonder what kind of site drivers are being employed. I have seen so many fantastic marketing sites die a lonely death because the companies behind them couldn't think past the creation part. People! I don't care how good your marketing idea is, it's junk if no one sees or uses it!

[By the way, Coke did something suspiciously similar with World Chill (public site is down, this is agency's mirror). Unfortunately, Coke didn't use Google, stupid stupid Coke. World Chill did let you log your location and your "chill" factor; which was kinda lame because it had nothing to do with anything else. Motorola had a lame attempt too with Pebl Pond. I think I'm going to call this stuff casual social-networking.]

So yeah, I made a mutant profile and I have the very heroic name of "Branded Newb" (ok wiseguy, you try to come up with something that doesn't sound stupid) with enhanced senses (the better to smell you my dear), teleportation (bad guys are coming, see ya!), force field (I get stuff thrown at me a lot) and kinetic charge (because Gambit is awesome!).

Bonus points for the first person who can tell me my specific location from the posted image. And yeah, I'm there because bad guys take vacations too and I'll be ready for em! If you must cheat, here's my profile.

via Random Culture.

[Update: Because I go that extra mile for you: Found out the work was done by Australian agency, Soap Creative. Site was launched 8 days ago on May 18th, which means they only got 4k registered users in 8 days. That's a horrible stat for a movie with this much following. C'mon Fox, spend some money on this, it's a cool execution.]