How Facebook updates can be made CNN headlines

I was reading my RSS feeds and found a post from CrunchGear mentioning that CNN has a service where you can order T-Shirts with your favorite Headlines from CNN and that it can be hack CNN’s headline T-shirt WEB application, for it to show the headline of your choice. How to do this?

Go to this site with the available t-shirt headlines, select any headline of your choice and in the URL e.g.

http://www.cnn.com/tshirt/index.html?headline=Waste food dished up to hungry diners&date=1208772622000&hash=4f2e03baf9a0cc4ed25c0dee1d0a56d3&return_uri=http://www.cnn.com/video/%23/video/world/2008/04/20/vanmarsh.uk.food.whip.cnn&session_id=&

look for the headline GET variable (shown in bold above) and change what is after the equal (=) sign up to the ampersand ( & ) sign. In my case I did the following:

http://www.cnn.com/tshirt/index.html?headline=G to the Square in in kickass mode&date=1208772622000&hash=4f2e03baf9a0cc4ed25c0dee1d0a56d3&return_uri=http://www.cnn.com/video/%23/video/world/2008/04/20/vanmarsh.uk.food.whip.cnn&session_id=&

Change it, press enter and voila you have your customer made T-shirt with CNN logo and date.

Imagine the coolness of this, if you could print T-shirts with custom made headlines and the CNN logo. Wouldn’t you buy one? I mean if CNN permits this with the logo, the satire behind it will be a killer business (of coarse its a niche market, but you get the picture). And for CNN is not a bad thing, they need to moderate the language used, but brand awareness will be created in other markets, suddenly CNN will be “hip” (INMO), don’t you agree?

Give it another twist, which is much better updating your Facebook status or having this custom make T-shirts that you can go around with and tell people how you feel, and that it so important that it made the CNN headlines. Even if Facebook considers doing something like this, CNN is CNN and expressing your self using the CNN logo, it’s “too cool for school”.