Scrabulous

» see scrabulous.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

in 2007 i started seeing scrabulous invites in the facebook sidebar. i had a facebook account by then, a computer engineer in ankara playing with the platform apps because everyone was, but english word games were never my category. i clicked on none of them.

scrabulous started life on scrabulous.com in july 2006. two brothers in kolkata, rajat and jayant agarwalla, wrote it because they could not find a scrabble clone online they liked. the facebook version came out about a year later and immediately pulled hundreds of thousands of monthly players. by early 2009 the platform's own stats showed something like 585,000 monthly active users, one of the biggest apps in the app-directory era before facebook turned the directory off.

the trademark problem was visible from day one. scrabble is owned by hasbro in north america and by mattel everywhere else, and scrabulous had used the name and the board layout without asking either of them. january 2008 hasbro started threatening legal action. july 24 hasbro filed suit in federal court in new york against the agarwallas and their company rj softwares. five days later, on 29 july 2008, facebook disabled scrabulous for north american users. that was the day it stopped being scrabulous in a real sense.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed ~

the facebook app platform in 2007-2008 was a specific kind of gold rush. an app could go from launch to millions of installs in weeks because the invite mechanic was uncapped and the news feed carried every action. scrabulous rode that wave harder than most because the underlying game was already a household name. you did not need to teach anyone how to play. the agarwallas got users the way farmville and mafia wars did a year later, on rails that would be capped and neutered before 2010.

~ how it ended ~

facebook did not want the fight. once mattel filed its own formal removal request in the european window, the platform pulled the app worldwide. the agarwallas rebranded fast: lexulous went live within days, with a different board size and different tile values to sidestep the copyright claim on the specific scrabble layout. it kept going. it is still running in 2026. but the scrabulous brand, the one that had the 585k users and the news cycle and the wharton case-study, was done.

~ the long tail ~

hasbro dropped its lawsuit on 20 december 2008 after the agarwallas agreed to stop using the scrabulous name. by then hasbro and electronic arts had already shipped an official scrabble app on facebook. it never got the traction the pirated version had. the audience had moved on, or moved to lexulous, or just stopped playing english word games on their profiles because facebook itself was changing shape. the pattern where the unauthorized clone builds the audience and the licensed version arrives late and lands soft repeats through the next fifteen years of platform history, but scrabulous was the case where the pattern was legible in real time.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »