Would you 'defriend' someone for a burger?

I have it. Everyone nowadays has it. My dad even has it. As of January 2009, there are over 150 million people on the social phenomenon that is Facebook.

One of my favorite parts about Facebook is the add a friend feature, which allows anyone to look up and add whomever or whichever member/profile they choose. I love signing on and seeing that beautiful "you have a friend request" right up there in the right hand corner. (My mind as my eye views, from a distance, the F.R: Yes!!! people still love me.... I now have more friends that Moe Smow.... I guess I'm not a loser...man I'm popular....ugh that guy is totally stocking me, who IS THAT?).

It constantly amazes me the number of users who redefine the term 'friends' to mean a wide variety of people, including, but not limited to, acquaintances, a friend of a friend of a friend, that guy who sat across and down one in Bio, a person who shares the same last name as you (but who you are not, as it has it, related to) and that girl who called your sisters ex-boyfriend a manslut at that one family reunion when you were 12 (Ahhh good times...). I admit that I have been guilty of this occationally. We, are after all, naturally competitive beings. And winning means accumulating friends the same way one accumulates dead skin (which is A LOT)

It should not shock any current Facebook user to find out that they have been unfriended now and again, for various reasons that remained unknown to me. That is until I came across a article in the NY Times entitled "Friends, Until I delete You." It really is very interesting, but if you absolutely have no time to do anything except for read this blog post (which is (well will be) very long) don't you love double now triple parenthetical references!!!))) I will enlighten you as to the most amusing part of it.

Apparently Burger King, not too long ago, launched an ad campaign targeting Facebook users. While this is no surprise, what they offered, in exchange for any user deleting a specific number of his/her Facebook friend base, is rare indeed. This was their pledge: If you sacrifice 10 of your friends, we (Burger King) will give you a Whopper for FREE!!! Sounds pretty tempting, right? Well here's the catch--when you delete said friends for said sacrificial beef burger they will be sent a notification telling them you would rather eat cheap beef than be their online buddy (really you would rather eat a 1/10 of cheap beef, or roughly 11 grams). 11 grams, just in case you were wondering, is 1/2 of the weight of one's soul (see 21 grams)) which that person lost anyway by selling out their friends.

The problem with the whole campaign was that they didn't realize that according to official Facebook policy, a person is only notified when someone adds them as a friend, not when they have been deleted. So their campaign tanked. Ooops!

FYI...I found the following Stats from those lovely press people at Facebook. Enjoy.

General Growth
More than 150 million active users
More than half of Facebook users are outside of college
The fastest growing demographic is those 30 years old and older
User Engagement
Average user has 100 friends on the site
More than 3 billion minutes are spent on Facebook each day (worldwide)
More than 13 million users update their statuses at least once each day
Applications
More than 800 million photos uploaded to the site each month
More than 5 million videos uploaded each month
More than 20 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) shared each month
More than 2 million events created each month
More than 20 million active user groups exist on the site
International Growth
More than 35 translations available on the site, with more than 60 in development
More than 70% of Facebook users are outside the United States