Google and Twitter have turned red on AIDS day. With a simple tweak, all AIDS tweets are font color red, and Google's homepage flashes "today is world AIDS day" (provided you hit google.com). The irony of "world aids day" only being shown on the .com is not lost on me.

Twitter's homepage (when you are not logged in) is red and says "1 Dec is World Aids day. Help turn Twitter (Red). Follow @JoinRED to find out how." The Hashtags #aids and #red will turn your tweets red - and so far (fingers crossed) I haven't seen spammers take these tags over yet. Maybe they have a heart after all? You'll see on @Joinred's background that Nikefootball.com/RED is the signee - however when I hit that URL I get a regular Nike page.

Facebook has also turned red - encouraging users to change their avatar to red ones.
This, coupled with the contagious earworm hit song from Shalmor Avnon Amichay/Y&R Interactive are both ideas that play on 'contagious', which in my humble opinion is exactly the way to go with AIDS campaigns. We concluded already in the early nineties that scare tactics do not work.
I've had a similar idea, not contagious but a lottery, showing just how easy it could be you which I finally managed to pull off on a bunch of popular websites back in 2004. I would have died and gone to heaven if someone as big as Google had joined in on that idea. The full story of this ancient idea can be found in my old portfolio, I have been dragging this idea along since I was in school wanting to make it happen just because I find the topic rather important. That's why I still get really exited when I see good AIDS campaign ideas executed. I'll tweet red as much as I can (when it's relevant) today just to join in.