Thursday, January 15, 2009

Facebook takes down whopper widget

Techcrunch: Burger King, through their insanely creative advertising agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky (see their recent Burger King perfume launch), launches a Facebook application that encourages users to remove Facebook friends. Sacrifice ten of them and you got a free Whopper. 233,906 friends were removed by 82,771 people in less than a week.
Facebook is overjoyed, right? What a great example to show the Madison Avenue agencies on how a big brand can get real engagement from users. This is the future of advertising. Or it could have been, if Facebook hadn’t shut it down, citing privacy issues:
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.


FB is run by a bunch of fucktards
What?
What's wrong with these idiots?
This is not the time to pull out "we care about our users, let's show them we care" because clearly, I think the users love it!
We're in a hustle and flow era- you go with it, you see how people respond and you adapt. Regulation, rule and condition doesn't fly with the 2.0 actions that are succeeding- openness is key.

Tapping my legal intuition, I don't even think this actually violates a privacy issue- the fact people have opted in to the widget, knowingly knowing that the sacrifice of selected friend will be publicised is no cause for concern.

Why didn't FB wait till someone caused a hoo-haa?

Well good one FB, good one. You really know how to ruin a good thing.


FB this song is for you:

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Would love to see the number of people who removed friends, redemmed burger and then reinstalled friends. This, along with the conversations on "why did you remove me", means users are using facebook more and in more complex ways. Bad move.