L - A - W - S - U - I - T : 10 Points
The most popular application on Facebook isn't surveys, "pieces of flair," or bumper stickers, although they all have tens of thousands of users. Until recently, the biggest source of wasted time on the social network was an application called Scrabulous, which has been getting a lot of press lately. It was invented by two brothers in India, but was so much like Scrabble that Hasbro sued to have the game shut down. Now Hasbro probably wishes it had never found out about Scrabulous.
At its peak just before Facebook turned off the application at Hasbro's request, Scrabulous had more than 1.3 million users. Hasbro quickly added its own Scrabble application to Facebook, and the brothers who started Scrabulous launched WordScraper, a similar but less Scrabble-looking version of their first creation. To date, Scrabble has 71,000 active users and WordScraper has 215,000 active users.
Part of the reason Scrabble has fewer users is the backlash Hasbro created when it shut down Scrabulous. People wasted a lot of time (much of it at work) playing the game, and they weren't happy that their favorite pastime was under attack. Setting aside the copyright issues for a minute, was this a good move for Hasbro? Many Facebook users probably don't own the Scrabble board game, yet this application was reviving interest among young people.
If I were running Hasbro, I wouldn't have sent cease-and-desist letters to the people who created Scrabulous, I would have sent an acquisition offer. How much would it take to buy off the two brothers who created the application? They can't have been making a fortune off the ads placed next to the game. Hasbro could have slapped the official Scrabble logo on the application, kept the 1.3 million users, and found some way to engage them and encourage them to buy the board game.
What do you think? Hasbro has taken a beating in the press for this whole story, but did they make the right move? Or are the outraged users right that Scrabulous should have been left alone?
*Image from Scrabulous.com*
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