Urbandictionary.com, Doppelgangers and pickles – What do trends mean for Facebook?

Photo from Mykl Roventine via Flickr

In case you hadn’t heard, last week was Doppelganger week on Facebook. The trend was so huge that the website myheritage.com had a special site set up just for the occasion. You could go to doppelgangerweek.com, upload a picture and it would tell you which celebrity you look like the most. Facebook also has applications for finding your doppelganger.

About a month ago, women were posting colors as their status, this trend eventually became national news and explained that women were posting the colors of their bras to spread breast cancer awareness.

And most recently, people have been looking up their names on urbandictionary.com and posting what they find as their status. These trends all come and go quickly but they show just how powerful social networking sites like Facebook, Myspace and Twitter are. They can spread news, opinions, and awareness quickly and efficiently.

The latest Facebook trend has users asking if a pickle is more popular than the band Nickelback? The trend is said to have started as an argument against Nickleback’s apparent Facebook popularity. The band’s page has over one million fans.

One user decided to start a page asking if a pickle could surpass the amount of fans that Nickleback has racked up. The trend is moving on to include an onion ring versus Justin Bieber page. Basically you take a random household object and compare it to a polarizing celebrity, favorites include Miley Cyrus the Jonas Brothers and even the Canadian Prime Minister, it’s that simple.

Everyone’s on Facebook and Twitter these days and trends are sure to continue. Television shows are now using these sites to get instant feedback. If you watch any of San Diego’s local news programs, you’ll find that they now showcase people’s responses to news stories. Just a decade ago, if you wanted your opinion heard, you wrote a letter or e-mail and hoped it would get read, today you can post your opinions on Facebook and all of your friends can read it and it might even be read on the air.

These trends are changing the way companies do business. According to Mashable.com, companies are approaching Justin Bieber about advertising on the onion ring platform. Social networking sites are a good , inexpensive way for new up and coming businesses to advertise, just get some followers on Facebook or Twitter and watch the word spread.

How do these trends get started? It is really hard to find the source of these memes but anyone can definitely start one. If you have over 10o friends, you post something funny that asks people to post it again and boom you’ve got a viral trend!

For example, Facebook and Twitter were the ideal methods to communicate the “floatopia” event at Mission Bay last summer that protested the beach booze ban.

Since the birth of Myspace, the ways we communicate are changing rapidly. Today when you see a friend around town or at work you may already know what they did last night or over the weekend. Depending on what your friend’s status was you may already have a great conversation starter or an awkward situation on your hands.

You can see and talk to family and friends across the world with Skype,  and corporations conduct business meetings from their respective locations world wide.

How have social networking sites changed the way you communicate?