Andy Cook Tell 'Em

What does Facebook’s Doppelgänger Week look like? Depending on who you are, it could look like a Simpson, Michael Jackson or, if you’re lucky, Angelina Jolie.

In order to celebrate Doppelgänger Week, Facebook users switch their profile pictures to famous people they have been told they resemble.

The trend appears to be catching on like wildfire, so much so that its success is being compared to that of the “bra colour” status updates. The recent viral trend had women updating the style of bra they were sporting in order to raise awareness for breast cancer.

The news feed announcing Doppelgänger Week on the social networking site this week read:

“It’s Doppelgänger week on Facebook; change your profile picture to someone famous (actor, musician, athlete, etc.) you have been told you look like. After you update your profile with your twin or switched at birth photo then cut/paste this to your status.”

For those who have never been compared to a celeb, the site has an application, Face Double, that will generate their long-lost celebrity brethren.

In an interview with The Huffington Post, game creator Bob Patel revealed that he came up with the idea after his colleagues teased him about looking like Tom Selleck.

Despite its popularity, Patel seems to take the game with a grain of salt.

“It’s way more popular than “Post a Profile Photo of Your Favorite Norse God Week.” Way more,” he said.

Quoted from Facebook.com’s blog:

“One of the most popular features on Facebook is tagging, which gives you the ability to identify and reference people in photos, videos and notes. Today, we are adding a new way to tag people and other things you’re connected to on Facebook — in status updates and other posts from the Publisher. It’s another way to let people know who and what you’re talking about.

People often update their status to reflect their thoughts and feelings, or to mention things they feel like sharing. Sometimes that includes referencing friends, groups or even events they are attending — for instance, posting “Grabbing lunch with Meredith Chin” or “I’m heading to Starbucks Coffee Company — anyone want some coffee?”.

Now, when you are writing a status update and want to add a friend’s name to something you are posting, just include the “@” symbol beforehand. As you type the name of what you would like to reference, a drop-down menu will appear that allows you to choose from your list of friends and other connections, including groups, events, applications and Pages. Soon, you’ll be able to tag friends from applications as well. The “@” symbol will not be displayed in the published status update or post after you’ve added your tags.”

Facebook has just launched a neat new trend mapping tool, called Lexicon. Similar to Google Trends, it allows you to create a trend graph for different words and phrases posted on Facebook Walls. It has a surprisingly useful interface, with a scroll bar enabling you to zoom in and out to get different views of the trend line. You can compare up to 5 different trends by separating words/phrases with a comma.

Although Lexicon compares favorably to Google Trends, it has some flaws. It only allows single words or words with dashes, and no support for any non-alphanumeric character. Also, to compare apples to apples, Google Trends has a wider range of data – including breakdowns by region, city and language.

Here is an example of Lexicon:

Due some some privacy concerns, Facebook announced in the blog regarding the release the quote,

“We have a cluster of computers that count the number of occurrences of every term (for example, “juno”) across profile, group and event Walls every day. The system strips out all personally identifiable information so that there is no way to track a mention back to a specific person. No human at Facebook ever reads these Wall posts, and Lexicon does not look at personal messages, invitations, or any other private user-to-user communications.”

So this looks fairly useful and has the potential to overtake Google Trends due to the extremely personal and accurate measure of each term.  Will more features come soon? I hope they will release a sorting method to only include certain networks or groups of friends, but they may never happen.

What are you thoughts?

I searched Facebook today for the Iowa State University Marketing Club group by searching “Iowa State University” within the search box. Guess what I got instead of a listing of Facebook oriented Iowa State University groups/events/people. I got a search as if I was searching Bing.com with the same term. Is this the beginning of the partnership of Facebook and Microsoft to get back at Twitter? Who knows but I hope some cool integration of Microsoft’s arsenal of products within Facebook. Facebook’s active userbase of over 250 million people could give Bing the edge it needs to go up against search giant Google. What are you thoughts on this integration??