I’ve never been a “friender” on Facebook. Call me pretentious, but I think it really just comes down to laziness. Yet, despite my “selectivity,” I can definitely afford to lose some…for a tasty reward.

Burger King, and its agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky, unveiled a new Facebook application called the “Whopper Sacrifice.” By de-friending 10 people, you get a free Whopper — the tagline? “You like your friends, but you love the Whopper.”

Unfortunately, sacrificing a million friends won’t get you 100,000 Whoppers. Consumers are limited to “one coupon for a free sandwich per person.”

At first thought, you’d think to de-friend all those people you haven’t spoken to in years. However, your deed doesn’t go without notice as Burger King so diligently announces that you’ve sacrificed a “friend” for a Whopper.

An article in AdWeek suggests that this is the perfect solution to those people you friended but can’t remember why. But imagine finding yourself among the sacrificed from someone you were never really friends with…are ties officially broken once you’ve been sacrificed for a juicy, artery-clogging meal? At least with a real friend you can joke about it and discuss possible re-friending over a free burger. But quick, you can’t de-friend someone who’s already defriended you!

It’s interesting that Burger King actually encourages you to clean up your friend list and as a result, decrease the amount of information available on your account for the company to tap into. Perhaps that’s the “sacrifice” Burger King is willing to make in order to get its application on the profile of every hungry, meat-eating teenager college student user. What happens when, coupon redeemed, people start cleaning up their profile page and in effect, deleting the “Whopper Sacrifice” application?

Burger King has certainly had its share of interesting campaigns (my favorite, despite its relatively lesser buzzworthiness, is still the Whopper Jr. commercials – “You can’t sell yourself for a dollar, Junior!”). With the “Whopper Sacrifice,” they’re certainly creating hype.

McDonald’s is running commercials announcing that the double cheeseburger is back on the dollar menu. The commercial’s cute — all the dollar menu items are voting for it to be back on. The only naysayer is the regular cheeseburger, saying something like, “What! He’s twice my size!” Timing seems impeccable.

At the beginning of this post, 7100 users had been sacrificed, now it’s at 11530…I wonder how many Whoppers have been redeemed. I wonder, too, whether this campaign is an attempt at, ironically, making nice for the “Whopper Virgins” campaign, which sparked controversy and criticism.

Update: “Whopper Sacrifice Has Been Sacrificed.” (January 14th) Facebook shut down the Burger King application citing problems privacy issues — normally, users are unaware they’ve been unfriended, but the Whopper Sacrifice makes this “de-friending” public. Sounds odd coming from a company that didn’t/doesn’t have a problem making public everything you’ve purchased, when you leave a group, or, best of all, when you’re no longer in a relationship.