Looks like Farmville will achieve the Web 2.0 world’s newest achievement: social suicide in the Facebook era. What better way to lose friends than to force them to give you access to their email address.

It’s a very simple concept in customer-centric selling: It’s about them. If you want to connect to, engage and retain the modern consumer, keeping your products and service centered around their needs and comfort zones is critical. No matter how big you are or how self-important you believe yourself to be. The rule applies to everyone, from Google to Facebook to Amazon.

And Farmville.

Having attracted more than 70 million users playing their Facebook game – many of whom pay to play – Farmville today committed social media suicide. Users who, for months have expended millions of clicks and thousands of hours in their gaming environment, must now agree to provide an email address to Farmville. No email, no access; no matter how much you like the game.

What a stupid mistake!

For months, Farmville has tried to “entice” its users to offer them access to their email; obviously users didn’t want any part of it. So Farmville, for reasons really unknown, has decided to make it mandatory. Or you can’t play in their sandbox any more. And the result?

Backfire.

Try forcing consumers to do something your way, and you’re going to find out why companies fail today. There are simply too many alternatives – lots of other games to play on their own terms – to your “my way or the highway” mentality. Consumers are about control, and the open marketplace offers them plenty of options to empower them to be such. And that’s why this morning, I stopped being a Farmville game player forever.

Sure, I could put in an alternate email address – one I never check at Gmail perhaps – but that’s not the point. The point about social media is that it’s all about networking with people you like, who treat you like they like you. It’s about being friends.

Farmville is no longer my friend, when they demand access to my email address.

Of course, there’s a wider story here: All companies must learn this lesson. Stop telling consumers – especially option-empowered consumers – they have to do things your way. Don’t be tempted to think you’re “too big to fail” and take away choice and comfort from your users. What social media consumers giveth, they can just as quickly taketh away. It’s amazing in this day, so many companies still haven’t learned this lesson. Have you?

Today’s products feature “my-” and “i-” and other names that demonstrate that some companies get it. It’s about the consumer. And when you put up road blocks – registrations, permissions, access requirements, rules – they simply click away. Farmville is about to learn this lesson – if only by one user (me). But I’ll give them this: They will be remembered forever as the first “big” presence in social media that committed suicide because they forgot it’s not about them.

Another one bites the dust.