The news is probably stale now: Scrabulous has been taken off Facebook after being sued by Hasbro, the company that owns the IP rights for Scrabble. As I wrote in my previous post just a few days back, the writing was clearly on the wall. Techcrunch reports that Scrabulous is now inaccessible to people in the US & Canada. Initially it was conjectured that Facebook took this decision, now it appears that the application was pulled down by its creators and not Facebook, which is trying to be neutral between the two parties. I am sure this is not the end of the story for Scrabulous…

So what are the lessons here for others to take away? Here’s what’s top of my mind:

– Imitation V/s Innovation: Immitation has always been a legitimate part of innovation. Much of what the world regards as innovation has its origin in trying to copy what others are doing. But the catch is that you should not just copy; you also need to improve, to improvise, to add maybe a new dimension or a new use-case. If that happens, the imitation gets legitimacy as a stepping stone in the creation of something that the world would not have otherwise. Scrabulous probably fails on that count… it is simply a web based version of Scrabble; they probably innovated in terms of a new distribution channel for the game (which is not insignificant), but not in terms of the core concept.

– Tactics can undo your Strategy: I think the Scrabulous founders made a mistake by naming their application “Scrabulous”, which is clearly a derivative of Scrabble. From a legal standpoint, this establishes intent. People who are making strategic decisions about building products & services that are “me too” or closely resemble other popular concepts are advised not to repeat this tactical mistake – pl avoid name extensions or derivatives.

– The Social Graph Application Platform: This is a good example of how fickle social graph applications can be to its developers. The end-users don’t belong to the application developers.. they belong to the platform. Having a steady base of users that you acquired on your own puts you in a commanding position, and there is no substitute for it.

– Mass User Exodus Case Study: Scrabulous could be a defining case study in whether mass exodus of users can happen from one product to another, if one suddenly becomes inoperational due to some reasons. In this case, Scrabulous and its equivalent app from Hasbro are almost identical, except their ownership.

From a personal standpoint, this is an acid test for the Kolkata based creators of Scrabulous. They have been smart enough to create an additive “pass-time” for millions of people (albeit on a borrowed concept); lets keep our fingers crossed that they bounce back from this setback.

Update: Scrabulous is now available in a new avatar on Facebook. Its called Wordscraper and it has cosmetic changes from the previous design. Techcrunch reports – “….When Scrabulous was taken down, it had half a million daily active users and Hasbro’s/Electronic Arts’ official Facebook Scrabble game had only about 15,000. Two days later, the official Scrabble beta is up to 63,000 daily active users. Wordscraper has 3,600 daily active users. Now the race is on. Where will the bulk of Scrabulous fans go…. “

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