The true value of (Facebook) friends

I have to give it up to Burger King - their online marketing team has really been earning it's paycheck lately.

First, BK created sizeable buzz pushing their meat-scented body spray, the spray itself merely a vehicle to further promote brand awareness. And you have to awe in the fact that on the spray's website you'll find The King himself 1) scantily clad; 2) beckoning you to lay with him fireside; and 3) not arrested for this.

Not content with this success, Burger King recently developed a Facebook app called Whopper Sacrifice. Having already run its course, the deal was simple: if you sacrifice 10 Facebook friends, you get a coupon for a free Whopper. What wasn't necessarily intended, was how BK has now actually put a price on (Facebook) friendship.

The average price of a Whopper is somewhere around $2.40. This may be a little bit off, depending on your location, but we'll use this number for simplicity's sake. This means that each Facebook friend, in nominal terms, is worth roughly 24 cents. In total, 233,906, or roughly $56,137 worth of friends were sacrificed. Some other interesting valuations:

• My two cents = .08 Facebook friends
  
  
• 2008 Ferrari 599 = 1,260,767 Facebook friends
  
  
• Bear Stearns = 1,000,000,000 Facebook friends
  
  
• Alex Rodriguez's contract = 1,145,833,333 Facebook friends
  
  
• Mariah Carey's Legs = 4,166,666,667 Facebook friends
  
  
• US National Debt = 44,297,999,913,117 Facebook friends
  
  
• Unconventional setup to an obvious joke = Priceless (0 Facebook friends)