The unfriending era

A friend has recently told me that she felt upset of being defriended from a colleague’s Facebook profile. She had a discussion with him and he, after a click, easily eliminated her name from his social media list.

Facebook does not send any notification when you unfriend somebody, leaving the members to find out later they have been defriended when they cannot access to someone’s profile. It can actually be a unpleasant experience considering that the same person either asked you for the “friendship” or accepted your request.

On the other hand, it is true that relationship can change, you could be annoyed by somebody who posts too many status updates or you want to limit your network to the closest people.

This new trend of cutting down people is more and more spread. The new Oxford American English even announced that the 2009 word of the year is “unfriend”, meaning “to remove someone as a friend on a social networking site." In the ABC news I also found a debate on the usage of the verb “unfriend” or “defriend”.

Many online magazine and bloggers talk about the “defriending” process and some give you some advice (To De-Friend or Not to De-Friend); Cosmopolitan, for example, provides you “10 signs you should unfriend someone on Facebook”.

There is even a “Defriend Tracker”, an application that should show a list of the people who have defriended you on Facebook.

Regarding the unfriending trend, in the New York Times I found an article - “Friends until I delete you” - that mentions a particular adverting campaign run some months ago by Burger King, called “Whopper Sacrifice”. In few words, the global chain of fast food restaurants offered a free hamburger to anybody who could “sever the sacred bond with ten Facebook friends” (the New York Times). The “nicest part” was that Burger King was sending notifications to the unfriended people saying that they “were dropped for a free sandwich” (actually for a tenth of it!). It seems that more than 230,000 friends were damped. The fast food chain ended the program to fulfill Facebook’s policy.

Whopper Sacrifice is the first Facebook application I have known that, instead of creating connections (joining a group), asked you to decrease your network.

In my opinion this campaign was a success and a brilliant idea: being so bizarre it generated a lot of press coverage and it was so smart to take the advantage of a trendy process that has been arising all around the world. It basically provides you with an excuse to unfriend people! Even if it is not a nice feeling being unfriended for an hamburger, I think that people had fun with it and nobody was really offended. You could always re-friend them, maybe using some funny messages, like “Don’t worry I cannot eat anything else, I am full now”.

The unfriending era has just started.