Recently, Burger King launched a whopper (note lowercase pun) of a promotion, utilizing a Facebook application to hand out free coupons for their Whopper sandwich. The program asked Facebook users to remove 10 Facebook friends to get a free coupon. A reported 233,906 Facebook friends were removed by 82,771 people in less than a week.
Chalk one up for Burger King (and advertising agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky).
Unfortunately, Facebook, apparently miffed that the promotion encouraged a shrinking of their networking engine, chose to ban the application siting privacy issues. Tech Crunch quoted Facebook:
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 Mr. Homer Simpson would say, Doh.
Again, from Tech Crunch:
Did anyone talk to the sales department before pulling the trigger on this? 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.
