Burger King has gone beyond virtual pokes and flowers to create a Facebook app with some real meat behind it. As described by the NY Times Bits blog, a free Whopper could be had in exchange for just ten deleted friends. A volunteer sacrifice group quickly emerged and Jason Kottke did the math to show that the promotion valued Facebook's entire network at just $1.8 billion (a mere 750 million Whoppers).

Even before the giggles subsided the sound of social marketing ground being broken emerged. The Viral Blog found value in the large numbers of people just watching friends get chopped for hamburgers on activity feeds. The youth marketing blog ypulse liked a promotion that was based in the reality that most people needed to trim their friends anyway (and found a post by the Harvard Law blog Digital Natives with a brief on the growing field of 'unfriending').

On Wednesday Facebook decided that the promotion was perhaps a bit too far ahead of its time. Inside Facebook explained that public 'unfriending' violated Facebook's privacy policy and that Burger King had been asked to disable the application. TechCrunch was then one of the first to express amazement that Facebook would disavow a much needed Madison Avenue victory because of an innocuous privacy issue that hurt no one. Burger King's advice to the unfriended? Just send the beef fed creep an Angry Gram [caution - sound].

• Your Site is Keyword Optimized, But is it Search Engine Friendly? You Might Be Suprised! (Search Engine Guide)
• 4 Basic PPC Mistakes You Can Correct Today (Online Marketing Mavens)
• 5 Frequently Used / Abused SEO Link Building Techniques (SEO Design)
• 9 Tips to Write Effective Google AdWords Copy (Search Engine Journal)
• Creating a Sweet High Value Keyword List in 5 Minutes (SEO Book)
• How to Optimize Your Site for Link Building (Search Engine Journal)
• 5 Tools to Help Assess the Link Building Landscape (Search Marketing Sage)

• 5 Good Ways To Discover Twitter Applications (TechCrunch)
• 5 Characteristics of a Successful Large Brand’s Facebook Campaign (find resolution)
• 10 Great Implementations of Facebook Connect (Mashable)
• 7 Reasons Your Social Media Marketing Failed [and how to fix it!] (StuntDbl)
• Top 20 Up & Coming Facebook Apps for January 13, 2009 (Inside Facebook)
• 10 Tips to Be Effective at Marketing on Twitter (TwiTip)
• Analyze Digg Success with These Tools (Search Engine Journal)
• How Major Retailers Can Improve the Effectiveness of Their Facebook Pages (Inside Facebook)

• 20 Websites with Beautiful Typography (Six Revisions)
• AB Testing Case Study: The Dangers of Overreacting (Get Elastic)

• Subject Line Research Reveals Content is as Important as Length (BeRelevant)
• New Way to Send Video Emails? (Aweber)
• The Current State of Video in Email (Campaign Monitor)
• Seven Ways to Improve Your Welcome Emails (invesp)
• Subject lines: 10 points to watch (Email Marketing Reports)

• How and When to Use Custom Reports in Google Analytics (Web Analytics World)
• The 8 Most Important Conversion Metrics You Should Be Tracking (KISSMetrics)
• 50+ More Ways to Track Website Traffic (Mashable)

• eBay Founder Omidyar Launching New Startup Ginx, A Twitter-Based Sharing Tool (paidContent)
• Deep inside the Windows 7 Public Beta: an in-depth tour (ars technica)
• YipIt - Deep Local Search for Products and Services (Center Networks)
• Google Testing New AdWords Budgeting Option (ineedhits)
• SocialScope, the new Social Networks Aggregator for BlackBerry (LucaFiligheddu)
• Hands on: Storytlr lifestreaming tells your story online (ars technica)
• Present.ly – Internal Microblogging Just Got Better (Dave Fleet)
• Track Your Internet Life With Snowl 0.2 (Epicenter)
• Sites That Bring Online Shopping Benefits Offline (Gigaom)
• iMob Hits The iPhone: Prepare To Become An Addict (TechCrunch)