So much for sacrificing your Facebook friends for a free hamburger.

Burger King has shut off the grill on Whopper Sacrifice, a popular Facebook application that offered users a coupon for a free Burger King sandwich if they dumped 10 of their Facebook friends.

A spokeswoman for Burger King said the company elected to discontinue the campaign Wednesday after Facebook asked developers to tweak one of the main features.

As Facebookers deleted the 10 unlucky friends deemed to be worth trading for 37 cents’ worth of fast food, the application sent a humorous notification to each of the banished friends, bluntly alerting them that they were abandoned for a free hamburger. The messages were similar to the alerts received when a Facebook friend is added or a comment is posted to a user’s message board.

A Facebook spokesman said the company was concerned the de-friending notification would disrupt users’ privacy expectations. Typically, no notification is sent when a Facebook user removes a friend.

The spokesman did not say whether a specific complaint prompted Facebook’s request that Burger King remove that particular aspect of the Whopper Sacrifice.

But rather than make the necessary changes, Burger King terminated the campaign altogether.

“While Facebook was a great sport, they did ask for changes that would have resulted in a different approach to our application, counter to what we developed,” Burger King said in a statement. “Ultimately, based on philosophical differences, we decided to conclude the campaign and chose to ‘sacrifice’ the application.”

Before Burger King pulled the campaign, there had been no shortage of Facebookers willing to slim down their friend lists while fattening their bellies. Nearly 234,000 Facebookers were de-friended for the sake of a hamburger. That amounted to more than 23,000 coupons for free Whoppers. Participants who deleted 10 friends before the application was closed down will still receive their coupons via snail mail.

In an interview last week, Brian Gies, vice president for marketing for the fast-food chain, said Burger King intended to limit the promotion to 25,000 Whopper coupons.

The company said Thursday that it had no plans to introduce new versions of the campaign on any other social networking site.