War of the Words

The BBC reports that Facebook has been asked to withdraw the wildly popular Scrabulous application, following complaints from toymakers Mattel and Hasbro, who own the Scrabble trademark.

Scrabulous, created by third party developers for Facebook, currently ranks among the site's top ten applications, with around 600,000 active daily users. And these loyalists have already mobilised to create the Save Scrabulous group. They're encouraging fans to log their protest with the toy makers. There's even an online petition with nearly 700 signatures to date.

Scrabulous has attracted such a following because it gives Facebook users bragging rights with their mates. Being the wordgame master among your social network friends confers kudos in a somewhat more intellectual way than being the top Rockstar Vampire. A burgeoning number of 'scrabble cheat' websites attest to the social value of being a Scrabulous star.

Mattel and Hasbro missed a trick, failing to leverage a property that was online gold. Scrabulous developers Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla spotted the opportunity - and their ingenuity was in not simply developing an online version of Scrabble, but recognising its value as a social widget.

It's as if a Scrabble ecosystem has developed, with several groups having a stake in the intellectual value of the word game. There's the original idea for Scrabble, owned by the big companies, the tweaked idea, with the addition of social networking functionality, part borrowed, sort of 'owned' (they hope) by the Scrabulous developers, and, the intellectual standing gained by champion Scrabulous players. Add to that the cheat websites and Scrabble is rich brain food indeed, feeding minds, boosting social currency and wallets.

It remains to be seen how the intellectual property battle will pan out. Not only the developers, but Facebook, face the music. By throwing open its doors to third party applications, which live on the site, Facebook has, to some extent, aligned its fate to that of external developers.

The social network's member base and user engagement rocketed last year when it invited outside applications - games, quizzes, film and music sharing widgets flooded in. Now Facebook shares the grief and the potential loss of visitors, or decline in the time spent by users within the site, should popular applications be withdrawn. For some people, Facebook is Scrabulous and the social network's value would be diminished without it.