Archive for the ‘social networks’ Category.

No more scrabulous

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 sees Scrabulous as a Risk to their Monopoly

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.

What if there was a smackdown, but no-one could see any of the blows?

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.

Top 100, according to the LibraryThing

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.

  1. Harry Potter and the sorcerer’s stone by J.K. Rowling (32,484)
  2. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Book 6) by J.K. Rowling (29,939)
  3. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Book 5) by J.K. Rowling (28,728)
  4. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Book 2) by J.K. Rowling (27,926)
  5. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Book 3) by J.K. Rowling (27,643)
  6. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Book 4) by J.K. Rowling (27,641)
  7. The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown (23,266)
  8. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien (21,325) *
  9. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Book 7) by J.K. Rowling (20,485)
  10. 1984 by George Orwell (19,735) *
  11. Pride and Prejudice (Bantam Classics) by Jane Austen (19,583)
  12. The catcher in the rye by J.D. Salinger (19,082)
  13. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (17,586)
  14. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (16,210)
  15. The lord of the rings by J.R.R. Tolkien (15,483) *
  16. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini (14,566)
  17. Jane Eyre (Penguin Classics) by Charlotte Bronte (14,449)
  18. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon (13,946)
  19. Life of Pi by Yann Martel (13,272)
  20. Animal Farm by George Orwell (13,091)
  21. Angels & demons by Dan Brown (13,089)
  22. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (13,005)
  23. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte (12,777)
  24. One Hundred Years of Solitude (Oprah’s Book Club) by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (12,634)
  25. The Fellowship of the Ring (The Lord of the Rings, Part 1) by J.R.R. Tolkien (12,276) *
  26. Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden (12,147)
  27. The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger (11,976)
  28. The Two Towers (The Lord of the Rings, Part 2) by J.R.R. Tolkien (11,512) *
  29. The Odyssey by Homer (11,483)
  30. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (11,392) **
  31. Slaughterhouse-five by Kurt Vonnegut (11,360) **
  32. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (11,257)
  33. The return of the king : being the third part of The lord of the rings by J.R.R. Tolkien (11,082) *
  34. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (10,979) *
  35. American Gods: A Novel by Neil Gaiman (10,823)
  36. The chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis (10,603)
  37. The hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy by Douglas Adams (10,537) **
  38. Lord of the Flies by William Golding (10,435)
  39. The lovely bones : a novel by Alice Sebold (10,125)
  40. Ender’s Game (Ender, Book 1) by Orson Scott Card (10,092)
  41. The Golden Compass (His Dark Materials, Book 1) by Philip Pullman (9,827)
  42. Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch by Neil Gaiman (9,745) *
  43. Dune by Frank Herbert (9,671)
  44. Emma by Jane Austen (9,610)
  45. Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (9,598)
  46. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Bantam Classics) by Mark Twain (9,593)
  47. Anna Karenina (Oprah’s Book Club) by Leo Tolstoy (9,433)
  48. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke (9,413)
  49. Middlesex: A Novel by Jeffrey Eugenides (9,343)
  50. Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire (9,336)
  51. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (9,274)
  52. The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien (9,246)
  53. The Iliad by Homer (9,153)
  54. The Stranger by Albert Camus (9,084)
  55. Sense and Sensibility (Penguin Classics) by Jane Austen (9,080)
  56. Great Expectations (Penguin Classics) by Charles Dickens (9,027)
  57. The Handmaid’s Tale: A Novel by Margaret Atwood (8,960)
  58. On the Road by Jack Kerouac (8,904)
  59. Freakonomics [Revised and Expanded]: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt (8,813)
  60. The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint Exupery - (8,764)
  61. The lion, the witch and the wardrobe by C. S. Lewis (8,421)
  62. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle (8,417)
  63. Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman (8,368) *
  64. The Grapes of Wrath (Centennial Edition) by John Steinbeck (8,255)
  65. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (8,214)
  66. The Name of the Rose: including Postscript to the Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco (8,191)
  67. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (8,169)
  68. Moby Dick by Herman Melville (8,129)
  69. The complete works by William Shakespeare (8,096)
  70. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond (7,843)
  71. Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris (7,834)
  72. The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel (Perennial Classics) by Barbara Kingsolver (7,829)
  73. Hamlet (Folger Shakespeare Library) by William Shakespeare (7,808)
  74. Of Mice and Men (Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century) by John Steinbeck (7,807)
  75. A Tale of Two Cities (Penguin Classics) by Charles Dickens (7,793)
  76. The Alchemist (Plus) by Paulo Coelho (7,710)
  77. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (7,648)
  78. The Picture of Dorian Gray (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (Barnes & Noble Classics) by Oscar Wilde (7,598)
  79. The Elements of Style, Fourth Edition by William Strunk (7,569)
  80. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (7,557)
  81. The Subtle Knife (His Dark Materials, Book 2) by Philip Pullman (7,534)
  82. Atonement: A Novel by Ian McEwan (7,530)
  83. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (7,512)
  84. The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd (7,436)
  85. Dracula by Bram Stoker (7,238)
  86. Heart of Darkness (Dover Thrift Editions) by Joseph Conrad (7,153)
  87. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (7,055)
  88. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (7,052)
  89. The amber spyglass by Philip Pullman (7,043)
  90. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Penguin Classics) by James Joyce (6,933)
  91. The Unbearable Lightness of Being: A Novel (Perennial Classics) by Milan Kundera (6,901)
  92. Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse (6,899)
  93. Neuromancer by William Gibson (6,890) **
  94. The Canterbury Tales (Penguin Classics) by Geoffrey Chaucer (6,868)
  95. Persuasion (Penguin Classics) by Jane Austen (6,862)
  96. Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman (6,841)
  97. The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova (6,794)
  98. Angela’s Ashes: A Memoir by Frank McCourt (6,715)
  99. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers (6,708)
  100. The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli (6,697) *

[ via Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho. ]

Scrabulous, after two dozen games

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.

January harvest

A couple of blogs that have crossed the event horizon lately:

Link & Tonic

Or a mojito, if you’re so inclined.