Facebook Cuts off Scrabulous After Legal Complaint

A highly popular Scrabble clone already pulled from Facebook in the United States and Canada continued its tumble over the weekend as the online hangout extended its block of the game throughout most of the world.
Facebook said Monday it was forced to disable Scrabulous after one of Scrabble’s rights owners, Mattel Inc., made a formal removal request and the developers of Scrabulous took no action themselves.

The Scrabulous application remains available in India, where its developers live and where Mattel has filed a lawsuit claiming violations of intellectual property. Facebook isn’t blocking Scrabulous there for now, considering the question of ownership still a matter for Indian courts to resolve.

In deciding to block Scrabulous on Friday, Facebook risked antagonizing a community of software developers it has been trying to nurture and promote. But had it done nothing, it could have faced liability for copyright and trademark infringement.

The company initially skirted that quandary after Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, the brothers in Calcutta who created Scrabulous, agreed to withdraw the program in the United States and Canada following a legal threat from Scrabble’s North American owner, Hasbro Inc.

Facebook had hoped for a similar resolution when Mattel, owner of Scrabble’s rights elsewhere, sent a similar notice, but the Agarwalla brothers refused.

In a statement, Jayant Agarwalla said he found Facebook’s action “astonishing” given the site’s “claims to be a fair and neutral party.”

The bulk of his criticism was directed at Mattel, however.

“It surprises us that Mattel chose to direct Facebook to take down Scrabulous without waiting for the (Indian court’s) decision,” Agarwalla said. “Mattel’s action speaks volumes about their business practices and respect for the judiciary.”

Mattel representatives did not respond to e-mail and phone messages Monday.

Both Hasbro and Mattel have been trying to promote an authorized version of Scrabble for Facebook – made by Electronic Arts Inc. in the United States and Canada and by RealNetworks Inc. elsewhere.

The Agarwallas, meanwhile, have released an alternative Scrabble-like word game called Wordscraper, which was not affected by Facebook’s latest action. They are hoping that with new rules and circular tiles instead of square ones, Wordscraper can withstand legal challenges.(AP)

Facebook Wants to Power Web-Wide Apps

FRANCISCO — Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has a vision for his company’s social networking site: serving as the platform to enable applications to run almost anywhere their developers want.

Zuckerberg, who received a rock star welcome before speaking here at the f8 Facebook developers conference yesterday, outlined a plan for his company in which the actual Facebook site would become less important.

Instead, Facebook would become the engine for applications that cooperate and enable people to communicate anywhere on the Web, using devices ranging from PCs to mobile devices.

“The natural state of the world is for things to decentralize out a little more,” he said during his keynote. “At Facebook, we want to push this movement forward. It will be less about Facebook.com and more about the experiences we build together.”

Facebook has been making moves in this direction for some time, in May confirming plans to further open its platform so that third-party developers will be able to create applications using its source code that can run on other environments.

Those efforts, however, follow similar initiatives from rivals Google and MySpace. The two, along with Yahoo, Salesforce.com, LinkedIn and others, are participating in OpenSocial. Similar to Facebook’s platform aspirations, OpenSocial’s backers are creating a set of common APIs for building social applications on sites across the Web.

At the heart of Zuckerberg’s plan is Facebook Connect, a version of the Facebook platform announced in May and formally opened to developers yesterday.

Connect enables people to connect their Facebook identities, friends and privacy settings to other Web sites and applications. It also lets other Web publishers implement social networking features from Facebook.

Using Facebook Connect, when someone logs onto a site, for example to comment on a blog, they are immediately authenticated. More important, they can share their actions on that site with their friends on Facebook, so that the blog comment, a review or a rating would show up on their profiles.

However, Connect follows rivals’ efforts, debuting in the wake of MySpace’s own debuted its Data Availability program, which Google also followed by unveiling Friend Connect.

Simplicity may be one way Zuckerberg hopes to compete. “You can add Facebook Connect to any site with a line of code,” he told the audience. “Once they’re connected, people have access to all their identity components and connections — and the privacy controls are going with it.”

Facebook Connect became available to developers in a testing environment yesterday, and the company expects to roll it out to end users this fall.

Reining in troublesome apps

But Zuckerberg also highlighted efforts beyond widening the platform for Facebook’s social applications, acknowledging it be endangered by spam-like or misleading applications that grow through tactics like automatically propagating themselves through people’s networks.

Such applications have been a thorn in the side of Facebook’s overseers for some time, and the company has taken frequent steps to combat them.

[cob:Pull_Quote]”In the world we’re building, it becomes good for people to be good to each other,” he told the audience at his keynote. “Making the world more open and connected is more than any single organization can do, but we keep this in mind when we make important decisions.”

He added that Facebook has learned it needs to work more closely with developers to help them build apps that are useful and meaningful to users.

“We’ve learned we need to reward the applications that help people share and build meaningful relationships — and we haven’t done enough to punish the applications that have been abusive.” Now, the company wants to find a way to make sure that the apps that provide the most value are the most successful.

To that end, Facebook is launching two certification-style programs, Application Verification and Great Apps.

[cob:Special_Report]The verification program will assure users that applications are secure and “respectful.” Verified applications will get better positioning on Facebook. Developers also will be able to apply for the Great Apps selection process starting later this summer; criteria will include meeting the Facebook Platform guiding principles, a minimum of 10,000 users and a consistent track record of complying with platform policies.

Selected apps with be given greater visibility, likely leading to more usage, and will have early access to new Facebook functionality.

A redesign also eliminates the clutter of application boxes on users’ profile, highlighting only members’ most frequently used applications. Under the old layout, installed applications were displayed as a box on the user’s profile, staying there even if the person never used it again.