3rd Floor Balcony

I must admit a fair bit of addiction to Scrabulous, the Facebook rip-off of Scrabble.

Currently, Hasbro and Mattel have their lawyers demanding Facebook shut down this site according to a tech blogger on Fortune's website. Quittner has some smart comments about it - why doesn't Hasbro negotiate? Swoop in on the profits after someone else has done the work! The post has already spawned a petitioning Facebook group with over 12,000 members (as of Jan 16), which I've joined.

If Scrabulous goes down for any significant length of time, if Hasbro doesn't take advantage of this situation, and ends up screwing it for everyone, I'm quitting Scrabulous. I just can't take any more anachonistic institutions giving me grief. The one I've got is enough for me.

So I found an alternative. Meet WildWords, a Scrabble variant with a rather intelligent counter-premise to the 2 and 3-letter word memorization that goes on in all my present scrabble games: Reward large vocabularies by giving long words a chance.

Now, if only someone would port this to a Facebook application. (Take note, Hasbro!)