Global General
On Facebook, many have a good time looking famous
(China Daily)
Updated: 2010-02-05 08:42
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"What does Facebook's Doppelganger Week look like?" asked the New York Daily News. "Depending on who you are, it could look like a Simpson, Michael Jackson, or if you're lucky, Angelina Jolie."
Or Jet Li.
To "celebrate" Doppelganger Week, a recent invention of creative IT worker Bob Patel, Facebook users this week are replacing their profile photos with pics of famous people they have been told they resemble.
The game has exploded on the online social network. Not only is it "way more" popular than Post a Profile Photo of Your Favorite Norse God Week, as Patel told The Huffington Post, its success is being compared with the Facebook-posed question "What color is your bra?" - a dialogue designed to raise awareness of breast cancer.
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"It's Doppelganger 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 Daily News reported, the site has an application, Face Double, that will generate their long-lost celebrity brethren.
Not everyone in cyberspace approved. "Narcissism Exposed" scoffed PC World magazine's online headline. And Mashable blogger Brenna Ehrlich wondered (virtually) aloud if the game violated Facebook's own Terms of Service, as in "You will not post content or take any action that infringes or violates someone else's rights or otherwise violates the law."
"As far as we know, the site hasn't taken any action to quash this trend," Ehrlich writes, cheerfully disclosing that she's played the game herself and posted a look-a-like photo. "Of course, using a picture of a celeb in lieu of your own image is nothing new. In fact, using unlicensed images is really nothing new - blogs, Twitter accounts and social media site users do it all the time. The sheer magnitude of people taking part in this meme - along with the high visibility of the TOS violation - is what's noteworthy. Still, we really doubt that any measures will be introduced to put an end to the trend, which is only encouraging more interaction with the social networking site."
But the "sheer magnitude" of the response is positive. And at least until tomorrow, thousands of people will savor an astonishing resemblance to Brad Pitt or Zhang Ziyi.
China Daily
