The life and times of a fallen hacker
Archive for the ‘social networks’ Category.
As the wikipedia page reads:
As of 22 August 2008, the application has been blocked to the rest of the world.
That is, the facebook version has now been effectively torn down.
There’s always wordscraper. It has a couple of shortcomings (lack of blank tiles for example), but it’s pretty much the only real replacement available.
Hasbro, the owners of the Scrabble trademark, has sued the creators of Scrabulous.
The numbers are definitely on their side - the twin official Scrabble applications (due to other copyright reasons, the players United States and Canada have to use a different game than the rest of the world) get some tens of thousands users daily, whereas Scrabulous pulls in at least half a million players every day.
As the defendants, the Agarwalla brothers, are Indian and there are no tangible assets in the states, it’s pretty unclear how the case will proceed.
A Facebook engineer’s rebuttal to the aging, but still very much valid Facebook is the New AOL (in the walled garden-sense) is only available to an undefined subset of Facebook users, with apparently no way to expand the audience.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m quite fond of the implausibly extending social network, but this is beyond lame.
And while I’m pretty sure that the F8 08 will feature plenty of new tools for application developers, the walls of the garden are not likely to become any more porous.
I chose LibraryThing as my book management solution a while back, but haven’t really been that active in entering data.
And to delay the inevitable “let’s go shelf by shelf”-effort, I spotted a nifty related meme the other day. The newest Tuesday Thingers post challenges readers to see which of the top 100 books they own and/or have read, “top 100″ referring to the most owned books on the service.
The amount of Potters in the top ten is downright scary, but the list does get better once they’ve been passed.
The instructions are simple: bold what you own, italicize what you have read, and use * to note which books you’ve liked most.
[ via Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho. ]
Scrabble by allyrose18 (CC)
I’m now a scarred veteran of about two dozen games of Scrabulous on facebook.
And I’ve got to say that I’m still impressed by the service, right now running somewhere around 37 million games hosted.
The shortcomings I’ve found are mainly on the game itself, and not its electronic implementation.
Scrabble lends itself to many kinds of abuse. Perhaps the worst of which is the incoherent dictionary used to qualify words - why is a quality word like “SAXON” not valid, but extremely obscure words from foreign languages (like “TALOOKA”) pass with flying colors. Another abuse is the constant reliance (according to statistics provided in Word Freak, these account for 75% of words used) on two-letter words alongside the actuals, most of which have no real meaning beyond the dictionary (yeah, I’m looking at you “ZA” - no way anybody uses that for an abbreviation of a pizza).
So most of all the game should include a method to customize the dictionary - in a game without any AI this would consist of just limiting the lookups, nothing more.
But to traditionalists this might be enough to justify calling it a different game altogether. The team behind Scrabulous has been quite receptive on ideas for improvment (including a rewind-tool for checking out game progress), so the worst that can happen to the idea is a firm “NO”.
Wildwords takes several steps to combat these cons in the game, and it does sound like an interesting alternative. Now if only there was a decent electronic implementation available… The current offering seems to be somewhat Web 0.97, but that could be easily rectified by some enterprising developer. The game itself looks self-published, but that’s definitely not a deterrent, and neither is the price, especially considering the cheap dollar.
No bingoes thus far in the games, and the highest score per word is still somewhere around 70 points.
Anybody looking for a challenge is welcome to kick off a game.
A couple of blogs that have crossed the event horizon lately:
Or a mojito, if you’re so inclined.
