RIP Facebook Scrabulous

My name is Tina and I am a word nerd.

Don't lie; I know many of you are too - closeted or not. Words nerds all over the world today will be mourning the demise of Facebook Scrabulous, our favourite medium for duking it out nerd-style online.

The jerks people at Hasbro began the process of trying to take Scrabulous off Facebook back in January. They took the creators of the online game, a pair of brothers in Calcutta named Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, to court for intellectual property infringement this past Thursday, and Scrabulous has been pulled off Facebook as of yesterday.

Scrabulous was one of the very first Facebook application games (added in 2007) and quickly because very popular. In March 2008, the official Facebook version of Scrabble was available, but only for people outside of Canada and the US because the application was developed by Mattel (who owns rights for the rest of the world) and not Hasbro (who owns the rights for North America) - so really, can anyone be blamed that we have Scrabulous? As of April 2008, less than 2000 people were using the Scrabble application, while there were 600,000 registered Scrabulous .

Apparently, over 54,000 people joined the Save Scrabulous Facebook group - I guess those are sometimes real after all! - but I wonder what this means for Literati?