Legal Research

Wordscrape-abbulous

By Mark Lewis

I was off for a couple of weeks and am quite proud to say that I did not access my email for 10 days, which is up there with my personal bests. I did have 266 messages in my inbox when I returned but it was worth it. I still find it nice to know that there are places where wireless signals aren’t bouncing off of me and I can’t plugin.

Upon getting plugged back in this week, it has been interesting to watch the goings on with Facebook, Scrabulous and Hasbro. I find it curious that Hasbro has not simply accepted the incredible publicity it has received and worked with Scrabulous to capitalize on that publicity; but instead has tossed around lawsuits, in spite of the fact that the Hasbro approved Scrabble application on Facebook does not have a fraction of the daily hits that Scrabulous has. Now comes word that Scrabulous has been reborn as Wordscraper. It should be very interesting to see how popular Wordscraper and the authorized Scrabble game become respectively. The other interesting thing in all this is how Facebook seems to have positioned itself as a simple bystander. This seems to be a good example of traditional thinking clashing with social networking reality.

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on July 31, 2008 (boomark / email).