Scrabulous gets shut down. Good.

The blogosphere’s been buzzing about Scrabulous getting shut down by Facebook.  It seems the general public opinion is that Scrabulous did what Hasbro should have done with the game on the platform.  What people should think about is the fact that Scrabulous was built on a game brought forth into our lifestyle as a direct result of the marketing and availability of the game on store shelves that Hasbro paid for.  In fact, I’d go so far as to say that if the name weren’t to bear any resemblance to “Scrabble”, it wouldn’t have done as well as it did.  Yes, names matter that much.

Facebook has relatively speaking been a “free for all” development zone and the maintainers have until recently been taking a “let the markets decide” approach decide to almost anything: from what happens when you allow too many notification requests to be sent to letting sleazy mobile offers litter the application landscape.  Eventually, however, these things have to be taken seriously enough that intervention is required – and so Facebook takes this step.  Hasbro did start their legal pursuit of Scrabulous several months ago – back then Facebook did not touch Scrabulous.  However (and this is pure speculation), if Hasbro wants to market their application through the Facebook advertising platform, a conflict of interest emerges.

Scrabulous, good luck.