Facebook Hamstrings Whopper Sacrifice Application
It was easy to guess that Burger King's somewhat mean-spirited Whopper Sacrifice Facebook application was going to draw some kind of fire; less easy to guess was that the fire would be drawn from Facebook itself, because the application, to put it bluntly, worked too well.
In the world of Whopper Sacrifice, ten friends de-friended equaled one Whopper. Part of the ingenuity of the Whopper Sacrifice application was that when one de-friended people from one's Facebook, the application sent them a notification saying that they had been sacrificed for the sake of a Whopper. The viral nature of this key point in the sacrificing process was largely responsible for the application's runaway success. Unfortunately, Facebook claims that this was a violation of its vague, may-not-apply-to-Microsoft privacy policy.
The Whopper Sacrifice homepage claims that it has been disabled, although the counter keeping track of friends sacrificed continues to periodically climb, so clearly the app still retains some functionality. According to Facebook, all that has been changed is that the jilted friends no longer receive notice that they have been sacrificed, which not only chokes the app's virality (you can make up words when you're writing about the Internet), it quite frankly drains all the sadistic fun right out of it. What good is sacrificing some half-friend to the Whopper gods if they'll never know that they were sold down the river in trade for one tenth of an unexceptional hamburger? You don't think people are really that crazy for Whoppers, do you?
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