Was It Viral Coolness Or Was It A Coder Easter Egg?

One of the top stories on Digg.com over the past 21 hours has been about a scene from the television show Family Guy appearing on the JetBlue.com Web site.

It seems as though if you viewed the route map (located here) and typed in "pbj" (think peanut butter and jelly), the route map would be replaced from a scene from the animated FOX television show.

Now, Digg.com is becoming the new Slashdot in terms of identifying what is "geek cool" and this story has received 2,162 diggs (votes) in less than a day. So, this story is very geek cool.

The offending code is now gone. Going to http://www.jetblue.com/travelinfo/routemap.asp now only provides a nice route map. Typing in "pbj" does nothing, other than show you that you have to pretty much fly thru JFK to get anywhere on an otherwise awesome airline.

My question is whether this was intentional (my vote - no). Did Jet Blue "do the right thing" and take the code down ASAP (my vote - maybe, maybe not)? Other than getting a "cease and desist" letter from the folks at FOX, what bad could come of this?

This story had some traction in viral-land. It was moments away from "jumping the shark" into mainstream, via company IT guys sending it around to people in their office (and then those people to others...) This is the type of viral phenomenon that could have been even bigger and beneficial, with just a little thought. What if they kept the "Easter Egg" up and replaced The Family Guy scene with another one, one that had been approved by the company? What if the new scene included a code for 10% off a purchase in their ShopBlue store? What if there was a hat in the ShopBlue store that included the Jet Blue logo and the letters "pbj" next to it?

Now that would be a way to capitalize on viral marketing...

Aside: This reminds me of some company (I can't remember which one) that had an option on their 800 phone customer support system with all of the typical choices (for English, press 1; for technical support, press 2; for questions on a bill, press 3) but also had another choice (to hear a duck quack, press 9). Funny.

-aB