You can keep your friends. Facebook and Burger King stop the Whopper Sacrifice madness

You'll have to buy a Whopper the old-fashioned way now, at least until the next gimmick comes along. Burger King and Facebook have shut down the Whopper Sacrifice campaign as of Wednesday, January 15, which invited Facebook users to drop 10 of their friends to get a free Whopper. Facebook claimed "privacy" issues, but since more than 200,000 friends were dropped, you've got to think that had something to do with it.

The campaign spread virally, (we wrote about recently), and turned out not to be as cruel as it sounds. Often, people on Facebook will link to another Facebook user who they barely know and later wonder, "Why am I linked up to this guy, and why do I care that he's about to walk his dog? I don't even know him."

And so if you were dropping those friends, it's maybe even a convenience.