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.

I’ve recently stumbled upon a rather fascinating website called Sency.

Sency is a real time search engine which has implemented a filter in an effort to weed out some of the spam that comes along with real time results.  Another unique aspect to Sency is their free feed for websites & blogs.  They offer websites & blogs the ability to have automatically updating, real time information, scrolling on their webpage for any given keyword.  The free feed is completely private labeled and customizable. The content options are endless because websites and blogs have complete control over which keyword they use. Websites have the option to customize the background color, height, width, text color, and text size of the scrolling information.

The developers recently implemented a new tool which shows users the most popular links from today for a respective search term. This data, in addition to the real time results – now makes their service even more valuable for web surfers.

The real-time feed feature on any website for free is awesome, I can’t wait to implement it on here! So keep a lookout it is soon to come!

– Andy

A group of students in China have created PhotoSketch, a project that does exactly what I just described: it takes a rough, hand-drawn sketch, scours the web for photos that match, and runs them through an algorithm, stitching it all together. Check out this video on how to use it.

Update: Due to extremely high interest in this amazing system, the creators have taken down the site. I can’t wait to see what people dream up with this thing.

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.”

There’s one thing that will be missing from Sunday NFL games this fall: Twitter. The league brought down the hammer on the microblogging site Tuesday, instituting new, strict rules that will limit when players, coaches, team personnel, and media can tweet.

According to CNET News, the folks mentioned above must stop tweeting 90 minutes prior to a game and cannot resume until post-game interviews are complete. These limitations are supposed to protect “policies prohibiting play-by-play descriptions of NFL games in progress,” according to a statement from NFL officials. Not only targeting Twitter, the rules apply to other social networking sites like Facebook, too.

While it’s no surprise that the NFL has put the clamp down on its players, coaches and team personnel, it’s a shame that the media won’t be allowed to tweet from games. With the news that a man had received credentials to tweet from press row at St. John’s University men’s basketball games, there was hope Twitter might gain some legitimacy among traditional sports journalists. Oh well, like the old sports axiom says, “There’s always next year.”