Last week was an interesting one for trends on Facebook.  The week started off with celebrity doppelganger, where everyone changed their profile picture to their supposed celebrity look alike.  As the week wrapped up, another trend started where the Facebook masses used urbandictionary.com to search for their first name.  They then pasted whatever definition was returned and used that as their status message.  So, what impact did this Facebook phenomenon have for Urban Dictionary?

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I had mixed emotions when I tuned into Conan O’Brien’s last episode as the host of NBC’s Tonight Show a couple of Fridays ago.  However, my emotions quickly became “joyous and inspirational” as I listened to Conan, also known to his fans as Coco.  Conan mentioned how he was finally allowed to say anything he wanted about NBC and the debacle with Jay Leno over the Tonight Show spot.  Conan had nothing but kind words to say though.  He was grateful for his fans and for NBC making everything possible in his career of over 20 years as a writer on Saturday Night Live (SNL), host of the Late Night Show, and his short stint on the Tonight Show.  He claimed, “This should be a happy moment,” and had encouraging words particularly for his younger audience to not be “cynical” in life.  Conan showed behind all of his goofy, off-the-wall humor, there is a genuine class act.

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With the unemployment rate at 10%, the stock market 30% below its peak from the fall of 2007 and companies continuing to announce layoffs, it can be hard to remain optimistic these days.  However, Oscar Mayer is trying to change that by bringing some cheer with its Good Mood Mission campaign, which is a charity program aimed at feeding the hungry.  Consumers are encouraged to go to their Good Mood Mission site to submit a “good mood” comment that starts with “it doesn’t get better than”.  For each good mood submitted, the company will donate a pound of food to Feeding America, a hunger relief charity organization.  I submitted a “good mood” myself and I did end up in a better mood just by thinking about the things that put me in a good mood.

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Last Thursday, Compete released its ranking of the top 50 food and cooking Web sites for December 2009. In addition to the typical seasonal traffic spike, the cooking and grocery sites categories have both sustained significant year-over-year growth. Traffic to recipe sites grew in 2009 as a number of the online outlets added mobile applications and new ways to interact with their brands. In addition, grocery store chains attempted to capitalize on the number of online shoppers by adding home delivery services, featured products and online deals.

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Compete recently completed an analysis showing early signs of the travel industry’s recovery based on overall site traffic to industry websites. Compete has used its ability to identify unique consumers to calculate annual unique volumes from 2007 to 2009. In summary, hotel and cruise showed signs of recovery starting in early 2009, while the recovery for air and car rental first appeared mid-year.

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CES 2010 has come and gone, but perhaps the biggest consumer technology announcement that week came before CES even kicked off, with the announcement of Google’s Nexus One on January 5^th. This new device ensured that the Google brand would be in the CES news coverage all week long.  Nice job grabbing some attention early!

However, not all of the initial news was promising for Google and the Nexus One.  While the handset has received very positive reviews among consumers and professionals, commonly citing it as the best Android device by far, there have also been complaints.  These ranged from things like 3G connectivity to customer service problems, a new issue for Google to think about as it enters the world of consumer electronics.

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