A jilted lover in New Zealand has come up with a novel way of disposing of an unwanted diamond ring, and in doing so has found yet another way to get Twitter into the headlines.

Anthony Gardiner, 29, bought a diamond engagement ring for the girl of his dreams, but it turned out that she wasn’t so keen and he was spurned when he presented the ring to her.

But there was a problem (apart from the fact that the love of his life had just turned him down): Anthony had bought the diamond ring in Hong Kong, so he couldn’t really take it back to the jeweller to negotiate a sob-story refund.

So Anthony has decided to set a treasure hunt in Wellington (NZ) this Saturday, and he’s chosen to publish clues to the location of the ring using this year’s social media darling, Twitter.

The ring is said to have cost around £2000, and Anthony says that he hopes the winner of Saturday’s treasure hunt is someone who has “found a cool chick and who wants to give them something they normally wouldn’t be able to afford.”

He plans to start the treasure hunt on Saturday at 0800 New Zealand time, but Gardiner appeared to jump the gun by tweeting “a bit early, but here is the first clue: Listen to Islands In The Stream by Dolly & Kenny very carefully…“.

An hour later he popped up again: “Sorry. That clue was fake. I just think more people should listen to that song“.  Still got his sense of humour then.

The Twitter effect has started to build already as the media have picked up the story.  Yesterday Anthony tweeted, “thought this would get big in my small town, but BBC calling me at the Bull & Bear? I’m just a dude with a spare ring. Dang“.  Quite.

You can follow Anthony’s diamond treasure hunt and his other adventures on Twitter at: twitter.com/donoogle_com.

Anthony seems worried that his clues might be hard to follow because he’s said that if the ring is not found by the end of the day, the clues “will change into directions”.

I’m 12,000 miles away so it’s not convenient to be chasing around Wellington NZ on Saturday morning, but I, along no doubt with a host of new followers, will be following along thanks to the marvel that is Twitter.

Nice idea behind the Donoogle site by the way (www.donoogle.com): it’s basically a Google search engine but every time you search on Donoogle they get paid a little bit (a really little bit) of money, and you select a charity to which they will give a big chunk of that little bit of money.  We like.

Update (8th June 2009):

Apparently the weekend’s treasure hunt was a success.

It took 14 tweet-clues and about 7 hours for the ring to be hunted down in Wellington; it was by the helipad on the waterfront, apparently.

The new ‘Lord of the Ring’ is 21-year-old Ryan Roselli, and you can find a snap of Ryan on the waterfront, accompanied by a TV news crew, here.