Facebook losing its "killer app"?

Wednesday, January 16. 2008

Facebook losing its "killer app"?

The BBC has noted that the makers of Scrabble want Facebook to pull the Scrabulous (virtual Scrabble) App.

Facebook has been asked to remove the Scrabulous game from its website by the makers of Scrabble.

The Facebook add-on has proved hugely popular on the social network site and regularly racks up more than 500,000 daily users.

Lawyers for toy makers Hasbro and Mattel say Scrabulous infringes their copyright on the board-based word game.

Be interesting to see if the Scrabble copyright is actually covering virtual social media usage

Anyway, of the people I know who are still actually fairly active on Facebook, the "killer app" is in most cases Scrabulous - poking (super-sized or no), wall-writing and (non)friend-adding has long since palled it would seem.

Scrabble owners would be better off buying Scrabulous...maybe that's the aim after a bit of value shakedown via copyright waving......

Update - sharp post here by Rory Cellan Jones re "Loss of Innocence" when cute applications get big and sue-able.

Posted by Alan Patrick in Web Services / Cloud Computing at 15:14 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0)

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Without Scrabulous, there is little reason to visit facebook regularly. I'll be gutted if it's removed. It's my absolute favourite thing on facebook and keeps me hooked into it. I also delude myself that it's educational and increasing my vocabulary so it's also 'good for me'.

I hope Hasbro and Scrabulous come to some kind of arrangement. In the meantime, help save Scrabulous by joining the Save Scrabulous group on facebook here: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=4772916593

Maybe people power will work. Well it worked to get Cadbury's Wispa back on the shelves...

#1 technokitten (Homepage) on 2008-01-16 16:32 (Reply)

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