While Burger King’s effort is mostly about quick hit marketing and getting some press (result: success!), they might actually be onto something. As our networks on social networking sites grow and grow with people we barely know, the value of them deteriorates – to the point that removing 10 “friends” for a free sandwich actually seems like a reasonable proposition.
Facebook is evolving its product to deal with this issue – the ability to group your friends and then filter the News Feed to see updates from only certain people helps a lot. But it’s not nearly robust enough – for instance, you still can’t filter status updates by group. Meanwhile, Twitter offers no such filtering, instead yielding the demand for more custom microblogging to a variety of startups.
I like following a lot of people on social sites – it gives me a good idea of what people are talking about and creates an opportunity to engage in more conversations. But frankly, when you’re following hundreds if not thousands, a lot of those people become more or less interchangeable, especially when there are no good options to filter the noise.