Scrabulous World Champion

After seven long months of competition we finally have a Twitterverse Scrabulous World Champion. @hooeyspewer waltzed her way through the World Championship without dropping a single match. She defeated @debcoates 390 to 352 in the final match.

People have asked if we're going to have another World Championship? The answer is most definitely yes. We'll do it a little differently next time, however. I've been consulting many of the competitors for their suggestions, and here is what will be different: 1) single elimination vs double, 2) top-four players seeded, 3) one week time-limit to complete a game (please!), and 4) bribing the Commissioner is permitted. The seedings for the next Championship:

• hooeyspewer
• debcoates
• stopstalkingme
• k1v1n (sorry @jerobins: see #4)

I had no idea when we started this competition last October that it was going to take so long to complete. Regardless it's been lots of fun. So, it's time to start getting ready to do it again. If you want to play you'll need to join the Twitterverse Scrabulous World Championship Series group on Facebook. I'll start building the brackets again next week. So let me know if you want to play.

The seedy side of Scrabulous that I'd totally missed

I'm feeling really stupid, that as the Commissioner of the Twitterverse Scrabulous World Championship Series, that I didn't know that Scrabulous had a secret side. You can imagine my shock when I come to learn that it has this whole other "purpose": How a stuffy board game became became a sleazy internet pickup joint:

Because on its surface, Scrabble is no Twister. Its board is a prosaic, melancholy wash of pallid blues, reds and grays. Opportunities to maneuver are restrictive (no saucy diagonals allowed). And scoring is banal — most letters are worth an underwhelming one point. Most mood-killing of all, the game is slow and it's long — a ten-minute wait between turns isn't uncommon. Combine a fireside game of Scrabble with a bottle of Chianti, and you and your date will be asleep before the first triple-word score.

This monotonous pace, however, is perfect for an online game of smutty Scrabulous. For many players, once the lewd dialogue begins, it supercedes the game itself. Long stretches of time between turns mean ample chance to hone one's dirty talk. "I don't think people really pay attention to the game once the flirting has begun," says Jack, a serious player with an impressive rating of 1,500+. He often seizes upon his opponent's distraction to win the game and further increase his rank. And he appreciates the metronomic rhythm that regulates and compliments the natural back-and-forth of verbal seduction. "The excitement comes from the fact that you have to take turns to flirt: your turn, my turn. You have to wait until the other person has completed their turn before you get in your next line."

I had no idea. My in-game chats have been restricted to things like, "nice play", and "where you been?" I'd been living under the "comfy" assumption that Scrabulous was all about the game. One should never be surprised when it comes to the internets. Live and learn.

Scrabulous World Championship skitch 2

Here's another skitch of the World Championship finals. The latest score is @hooeyspewer 269 to @debcoates 201 with 29 tiles left to play. Unlike the Democratic primary-- it's still too close to call.

The Hasbro boycott continues

Mashable jumped the gun a bit: Is Scrabulous Officially Dead?

In true Facebook fashion, a group was formed to help save Scrabulous, but to no avail. It looks like Facebook has complied, as the application is no longer active. There’s now an error page where the board game application used to be. And while it hasn’t been confirmed that Scrabulous is gone forever, this recent development appears to show Facebook’s compliance with Hasbro and Mattel.

Wrong! Having just played in several games I can report that Scrabulous is far from dead. There is no question that it is on life-support, however.

Hasbro, in trying to take Scrabulous down is pursuing a last century business strategy and it's a big mistake. They need Scrabulous just like a rock band needs their music played -- bootlegged or not. Scrabulous has helped to pull Scrabble from the pile of obscurity and created millions of new players in the process.

If Hasbro had half-a-brain they would be embracing Scrabulous by either ignoring it, or by cutting Jayant and Rajat Agarwalla a sweet financial deal. The worst thing that could happen is to have the game go away. Where I don't know the numbers, if I was guessing I'd say that analog Scrabble sales have soared since Scrabulous exploded onto the Facebook scene. Hasbro couldn't buy this sort of promotion at any price.

I hope that Hasbro gets a clue before they kill the goose...

Internet business models: Scrabulous

I was reading this article in Fortune: Will someone please start a Facebook group to save Scrabulous?, about Hasbro trying to shutdown Scrabulous for copyright violations. I didn't find the intellectual property parts of the article that interesting, but this did catch my eye:

Their site launched in 2006 and quickly signed up 600,000 registered users. Not too shabby for a year’s worth of work. So the brothers launched a Facebook application in June, 2007 and the results were stunning: 2.3 million active users as of today. For those of you keeping score, the application generated 70 million pageviews in the past month. Not a bad deal for a two-man operation.

I don't know about you, but 2.3 million users and 70 million page views seems pretty impressive. With numbers like that you'd expect them to be making some serious cash. But no...

Jayant said that he didn’t exactly understand what all the fuss was about. Its ability to generate insane numbers of pageviews notwithstanding—he said some players play as many as 170 games at a time on Facebook—the application isn’t throwing off that much money. He declined to say exactly how much, pegging revenues at “over $25,000 a month.” Hmmmmm.

That's only $300k a year for 2.3 million users and 840,000,000 pageviews?

If you're thinking that you might strike it rich on the Internet you might want to think twice before you give up your day job.