Ten cent friends?

Last month, Burger King introduced a “Whopper Sacrifice” application on Facebook. The user simply had to get rid of ten friends via the application and he or she would receive a free Whopper. For each Facebook friend a Facebooker removed, his or her profile picture was electronically burnt on screen and then that person was notified that he or she had been part of a “flame grilled sacrifice” in your quest for a Whopper. Additionally, the "sacrifices" appeared in users’ activity feeds – for example, "Genevieve sacrificed Columbia Business School for a free Whopper."

What’s strange is that Facebook shut down the application because of concerns about privacy issues. Facebook’s statement:

“We encourage creativity from developers and brands using Facebook Platform, but we also must ensure that applications follow users’ expectations of privacy. This application facilitated activity that ran counter to user privacy by notifying people when a user removes a friend. We have reached out to the developer with suggested solutions. In the meantime, we are taking the necessary steps to assure the trust users have established on Facebook is maintained.”

As TechCrunch points out:

All that happened is the user being dissed got a message telling them, which helps the application spread virally. Without that feature the app is far less powerful. There is no real privacy issue here, just a policy decision by Facebook that people shouldn’t be notified when you remove them as a friend.

Before shutting it down, the Whopper Sacrifice ended in excess of 233,906 friendships.

What’s most interesting is what this shows about the utilty of one’s online social network. While there are those who regard number of friends and/or subscribers as a useful metric, it seems as though it really isn’t. It seems, instead, that some of us have too many online "friends" we don't really want. Burger King, brilliantly, captured the issue of overwhelming network size and incentivized social networkers to defriend – valuing those friendships at fewer than ten cents a pop.

Genevieve