Sacrificing Your Facebook Friends and How it Hurts

I think pretty much everybody I know is rather involved in the Facebook movement. It really is such a strong way to stay interconnected and communicate with people (and just waste countless hours). Part of the process is gaining friends and some people try add anybody and everybody they ever come in contact with. Of course there's a growing trend going in the opposite direction: people are removing "friends" because they no longer have contact with these individuals. Facebook doesn't notify people that they have been dropped, but now with a lot of the new features (and the friend counter) it isn't difficult for somebody to tell somebody has dropped them. About a month ago in the Wall Street Journal they ran an article about getting unfriended and how that hurts. It really can be a dangerous thing. People freak out pretty badly sometimes about being unfriended or hold grudges. I know I removed an ex-girlfriend not too long ago and she didn't seem too pleased about it. But seriously, I think we get a little too touchy about this kind of thing. It's not the end of the world if you're not Facebook friends anymore. Although, frankly I don't think it's a wise thing to be unfriending people for reasons other than them hating you. Having networking connections is always a handy thing in life. You may never speak to the person, but you also never know when and if you might run into them again. You might be living in the same town and you never know how an old acquaintance might help you.

Of course if you're anxious to rid yourself of some friends, Burger King can relate. They created an application for Facebook which allowed you to sacrifice friends in order to get a free coupon for their Whopper®. The catch was the application would notify your friends that you had "sacrificed" them. Of course if you had a big hankering for that Whopper®, I regret to inform you that Facebook shut the application down. Apparently the notifications (and potentially the sacrificing) violated some of Facebook's usage agreements so Burger King is no longer able to employ this marketing strategy. But if you really want to ditch some friends, you're still more than welcome to give them up to the sacrifice.