Facebook takes bite out of Whopper Sacrifice

January 14, 2009 | Eric Eldon | Comments |
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Burger King’s ingenious Facebook application, Whopper Sacrifice, has gotten a little healthier for Facebook friendships. The app, launched last week, awarded Facebook users a free Whopper hamburger if they defriended 10 Facebook friends. At first, the app notified your friends when you sacrificed their friendship for fast food — today, Facebook has made the app stop doing this.

Here’s Facebook statement on the matter:

We encourage creativity from developers and companies using Facebook Platform, but we also must ensure that applications follow users’ expectations and privacy. After extensive discussions with the developer, we’ve made some changes to the application’s behavior to assure that users’ expectations of privacy are maintained. The application remains active on Facebook.

Note: The app currently displays a message saying that Facebook has disabled it. We’re asking Facebook if this is, in fact, the case given the above statement — it may be that the app isn’t actually disabled, and instead the developer is just choosing to disable it in order to gain extra publicity.

The app has 82,771 monthly active users, with more than 230,000 friendships sacrificied for it so far. It was built for Burger King by Refresh Partners in partnership with Burger King’s marketing firm, Crispin Porter.

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Photo of Eric Eldon

About the Author, Eric Eldon

Eric currently covers digital media technology and business news, especially what's happening on social networks and their platforms. He also writes and edits stories about venture capital, and lots of other stuff, too. He started at VentureBeat in the spring of 2007, half a year or so after Matt Marshall left his reporting job at the San Jose Mercury News to found the site. Eric previously cofounded a startup called Writewith, that was building editorial software for newspapers and other groups of writers. The startup didn't work out, but he learned a lot.

  • Brian
    It says that Facebook has disabled Whopper Sacrifice...... I needed to sacrifice 2 more friends too..... And I guess 233,906 is the final count
  • Brian, Facebook says it hasn't disabled the app so not sure what's going on.
  • Now that is one viral campaign. It got so popular that even Facebook would not dare to take it down. Massive props to Refresh and Crispin crews!
  • This was just a gigantic fail that everyone should have seen coming. I wonder how many people who got defriended thought it was a great viral campaign. Women especially see this as one big public slap in the face by their so called friends. I think Facebook reviewed the campaign for privacy concerns before it launched and thought nothing of it - that is, until a lot of users got offended by getting dumped in public. Try doing that to women sometime and see how it goes over.
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