Scrabulous to get scrapped

Hardly a week goes by without hearing something about the social networking world. It’s MySpace this and Facebook that. It’s getting a bit iPhone-ish for our liking.

So this time, it’s one of Facebook’s ever so popular third party applications that’s got them into trouble.

Scrabulous [is anyone else tickled by the name, or is it just the easily pleased News Editor ? –Ed] is a one of the more fabulous (yeah, we went there) applications floating around Facebook. It does what it says on the tin, really. It’s virtual scrabble that you can play with your mates through your Facebook profile.

The bigwigs over in Real Scabble HQ were none to pleased to hear about this little ccopyright infringement and had a few quick words with Facebook. Hasbro owns rights to the game in the US and Canada while Mattel has rights everywhere else in the world, so there’s really no shortage of companies to offend in this situation. You know, there being two and everything.

Scrabulous boasts about 600,000 (alright, 594,924) users a day, which is apparently only a quarter of the people who have the application on their page.

Fans are a bit upset about the whole thing, naturally, so they’ve started a group called “Save Scrabulous”. One fan posted a message that read "I didn’t have any Scrabble sets when I started playing Scrabulous a few months ago. Since I got hooked on that I have bought two sets."

Cheer up, love. You could always (and this idea is a bit out there but bear with me) invite your friends over to play some real Scrabble. . .