Stuff that’s been floating around the office – week ending 15th January 2009

Let’s get straight into it:

1. The Whopper Sacrifice and its sad end: Crispin Porter + Bogusky, the agency famously responsible for the Bill Gates-Jerry Seinfled Microsoft ads, came up with the concept of sacrificing 10 Facebook friends in exchange for a Burger King Whopper. In less than a week, Facebook shut the site down. If you go to the site now, you note that 233,906 friendships were sacrificed for this – kudos to CP+B and some negative press for Facebook. 

2. Tweetbacks by Dan Zarrella: Similar to the ‘blog posts that mention this post’ idea, Dan Zarrella has created Tweet Backs to track where your tweets are being referenced. 

3. Klout: As a sort of addendum to this post of mine earlier, Klout is a service that tracks your social influence across the web. Currently in private beta. Nope, I haven’t tried it yet. 

4. 8tracks: It’s been tweeted multiple times by now, so you must have heard of this (sort of) replacement for Mixtape and Muxtape. Music lovers of the world rejoice. 

5. Twitter Venn Diagrams: This is self-explanatory. 

6. Spotify: Another sort-of replacement for Mix and Muxtapes. Again, currently invitation-only, though I did hear some buzz on Twitter about that changing. 

7. Obama-themed coffee: The 42nd President of the United States takes oath next week, and to celebrate, Krispy Kreme UK are giving out free Obama-themed coffees if you say the secret phrase. 

8. TV.com: This could be Hulu’s identical twin, going by the look of the site anyway. Apparently it is CBS-backed. With Hulu due to be available in the UK in the near future, this will be an interesting space to watch. 

9. TabletPCPost: This is seriously one of the coolest things I’ve seen this week. Watch how Google can recognize your mouse-writing. (handwriting would be the wrong word I think!)

10. Ikea’s Embrace Change campaign: Ikea is looking to wrangle a contract to do up the inside of the Oval Office. What do you think it should look like?

11. Twitter scoops crash pic: It wasn’t good news of course, but this (as far as I know) is the first time Twitter has had the quickest access to photos of an event – and we’re talking even before the traditional press. As a commenter says here: “We were talking about this at 3.31pm on Twitter. It wasn’t even on CNN yet.’