What would the fashion industry look like if it shrugged off the exclusivity that has characterized it for, well, centuries, and cut out the middleman? It seems like the process is already well underway. This year’s Fashion Weeks had everyone wondering the same thing, and the buzz is best summed up thusly:

“The shows during September and October were a first glimpse of what the elitist fashion world could soon become: a business where designers take their collections directly to customers, no longer filtered through fashion editors at glossy magazines and buyers at top stores.”

But does that really mean the end of old-school power players like, say, Anna Wintour and Joe Zee? [New York Times]

First Facebook took over your personal life; now it’s taking over your dictionary. Well, only the New Oxford American Dictionary. Those wordy peeps have chosen the verb “unfriend”—as in, I unfriended Joey so he’d stop pestering me to play that stupid Mafia Wars game!—as their 2009 word of the year, which means it’s been added to their massive publication. “Tramp stamp” and “funemployed” are also new words Oxford included in the dictionary, but (luckily) “unfriend” is the only one we have personal experience with. After the jump, The Frisky’s tales from the trenches of “unfriending!” [Oxford University Press Blog]

Some people love their Twitter; others are obsessed with Facebook. Burberry is providing fans with a brand-new social media site: Art of the Trench. The brand has tapped none other than street style photographer Scott Schuman to capture countless images of people sporting their trenches, providing inspiration to the world on trench styling. The site is one of those you can sit on for hours, clicking back and forth between images to see a multitude of people captured by The Sartorialist. Comment, build your own trench profile, and submit a picture of yourself wearing one for the chance to be featured on the site. In the future, a history of the trench will appear, complete with a time line of events and “original black-and-white footage of the first wearers of Burberry’s trenchcoats.” No one should be surprised that Burberry is getting into the networking side of the internet, as the brand live-streamed the spring 2010 collection on their Facebook page, sends out e-brochures instead of printed materials, and plans to create digital look books in the next year. But we have to wonder whether social networking for your jacket might be a tad much? [WWD]

It’s quite possible the internet has finally gone too far.

While social media is taking over the fashion industry—D&G provided bloggers with their very own laptops in the front row—now it seems that dog and cat lovers have their own community as well. Fooniverse.com is a new social networking site for obsessed pet owners where you pick a preferred animal and then proceed to dress it, style its hair, have it strut down a runway, and have a photo shoot. There are prizes for the quickest blow-dry at the grooming salon, a special Foo currency, plus all the precious pics from that photo shoot can be saved to slip into your wallet for showing off like a proud parent. Yikes.

Of course, everything translates to Facebook. So now each and everyone one of your friends will find out through their news feed how your virtual pet fared on the catwalk. It’s like Tamagachi, but way, way overblown.

We think Brandon Griggs pretty much nailed it in this awesome article for CNN about the 12 most annoying types of Facebookers. My personal most-hated Facebooker? The ugly picture poster. (Come on girl, you know full well that I look like Jay Leno in that pic so why did you tag it for all the world to see?) In fact, we think there are way more than 12 annoying Facebook personalities. See if you agree with us. 

Facebook, the social networking site that has connected more than 150 million of us with people we wouldn’t recognize if we bumped into them on the street, turns five today! In honor of the big day, I’d like to reflect on the gifts that Facebook has given to us over the past five years. After the jump, the top ten gifts for which you can thank Facebook.

Burger King ran a promotion this month called “Whopper Sacrifice,” in which a free burger was offered to anyone who deleted 10 friends on Facebook. When Burger King started sending notifications to castoffs letting them know they’d been dumped for a tenth of a whopper, Facebook suspended the campaign. All this got me thinking: what else besides the lure of free fast food makes people un-friend someone? And how do people decide whom to friend in the first place? In an article in the Times this week, a recent graduate of Harvard (where Facebook got its start) advised “culling your friend list once a year to remove total strangers and other hangers-on. Keeping your numbers down gives you more leeway to be selective about whom you approve in the first place,” he said.

An NYU grad student has found a unique way to way to use Twitter. Corey Menscher, whose wife Ellen is eight months pregnant with the couple’s first baby, figured out a novel way to have Twitter notify him every time the baby kicks. For a class project, he invented a pregnancy belt he dubbed the Kickbee, made of a “stretchable band with embedded electronics and sensors” that “transmit small but detectable voltages when they are triggered by movement underneath.” The signals are then wirelessly transmitted to an accompanying Java application via Bluetooth.

It used to be you had to wait until you had ringing ears to know someone was thinking about you, but these days you can get an email alert any time someone Googles your name. Ziggs.com, a new social networking site, invites people to create profiles and promises to give them a top position in all search engines for $4.95 a month. Members get instant email notifications every time a visitor views their profiles via search engines like Google, even alerting them of the visitor’s location. This sort of thing just smacks of all kinds of wack, from encouraging rampant narcissism, to creating the modern day “waiting for his call” syndrome, as well as making people wonder about their exes way more than necessary. 

Social networking on the Internet is the easiest way to keep in touch with your pals, tell people what you’re up to without, you know, talking to them, promote your parties, and bask in your buddies love.  Back in the day, MySpace was like the Wild West—you could post, do, and say anything you wanted. Heck, it turned tramps like Tila Tequila into “stars.” But now everyone—including our parents [Even my mom got an invite!—Editor]—has jumped on the Facebook bandwagon.  It’s so mainstream, they’re making a scripted movie about the site.  So how do you keep your page fun to use, yet still appropriate for your family and co-workers? Here’s some tips:

Tag, You’re It!: Every time some bitch posts a picture of me with my eyes closed, a chubby double chin, sweat stains, and a face full of runny mascara, I want to die and/or kill them. But luckily, it’s easy to do some easy damage control.  Simply click on the offensive pic, then remove the tag. 

What’s sexier than a security blanket? Pretty much everything.  But that hasn’t stopped the insurance industry from trying to loosen its image.  Sexy Insurance, a new networking site catering to insurance industry professionals, is giving MySpace a run for its edgy market share. Instead of Tom, they’ve got Sean, a self-proclaimed “refugee” of the biz, who runs the site out of his basement.  His icon is an image of billionaire Warren Buffet with a speech bubble that says “I’m so sexy it hurts!” There are profiles, a following obsessed with The Office, a lounge for playing Donkey Kong, and a hilarious lo-fi video featuring 50 Cent “Fitty & Warren”. Although the new page is cool, the constant stream of new-age world music supposed to sex up the site really just makes us never want to date an agent—even if they’ll give us a discount on medical care. [Ad Freak]

A friend of mine has been dating a guy for three weeks. They hang out a few times each week and are sleeping together, yet they’re not “friends” on Facebook. My friend thinks this is weird. It’s not as though he doesn’t use Facebook. In fact, when she was last at his apartment, he was on the website and showed her photos from his friend’s wedding. Conversely, I am “friends” with guys I went out with or kissed once, and now I’m not sure what to do about them. Do I de-friend them? Do I restrict their access to my profile? The online world makes things so confusing.