I am a deep domain expert in Scrabulous. At least, I’m a deep domain expert if expertise is defined as spending hundreds of hours playing the damn game. I spend more time playing Scrabulous than I do playing PackRat and I could make millions of dollars from that game (since we invested in the company).

You would have to have been asleep for the past year not to know that Scrabulous was developed by a web development firm owned by two brothers in India and that the brothers were sued by the owners of the official Scrabble game for violation of copyrights and tradmarks. Speculation has run rampant about what the owners of Scrabble, Hasbro and Mattel, both giant corporations, would do to the Indian company, which clearly did violate their intellectual property. Whatever is going on is not known to the general public, but Scrabulous has continued to be live on Facebook. (Actually, truth be told, the game experienced glitches for a number of months while the brothers scrambled to keep up with the popularity of the game, but it has been working really well for the past few months.) Real Networks introduced an online version of Scrabble earlier this year for non-U.S. users, which I haven’t seen because I’m in the U.S. And Electronic Arts just introduced the official version of Scrabble for Facebook, on a license from Hasbro.

What’s totally interesting is the difference between Scrabulous, developed by an Indian outsourcer that stumbled into the opportunity, and EA’s Scrabble, for which 25 people are given credit for design and development (most of whom seem to work for an outside studio).

Scrabulous works really well because it is a minimalist interpretation of the board game: Same color scheme, same board design, same mechanics: If you know how to play Scrabble IRL, you can start playing Scrabulous without even thinking about it. The game comes with resources that make sense, like the ability to interactively check the spelling (and therefore existence) of a word and Scrabble functions like the ability to swap tiles and challenge other users. The game comes with several helpful resources, like a move list, a two-letter word list, and a way to resign games. And if you’ve been playing the game (as I have) since it was first introduced, you’ve also gone through the process of watching the game develop and have developed a fondness (often known in marketing circles as brand loyalty) for the work the Indian firm has done to improve on their original design.

Then there’s EA’s Scrabble. I’m assuming that EA has a license to develop an online version of the board game without design restrictions. If there are restrictions on the game design, then just blame Hasbro instead of EA. As it stands, EA should just be ashamed for having released this game. In order to get started playing, you have to first endure an animation that highlights who made the game and then you have to name the game! Once you’ve done those irrelevant actions, you can start playing the game. But it doesn’t look like Scrabble! The board is colored differently and, obnoxiously, every single multiplier square is labeled TL, DL, DW or TW. Yup: You, dear user, are too dumb to remember which one is which, so they are labeled! The designers didn’t bother to provide any resources at all! So you have to go to cheat sites to look up words before you place and play them. And if you do play a word successfully, you have to endure an animation that counts up your score. And all this software that got developed makes the game slow to load and play. I measured that startup time for EA Scrabble is more than 10 seconds, while Scrabulous loads instantly (given the same network).

It feels as though the development team needed to show how good it is at software development, rather than focus on what made a Scrabble enthusiast happy. EA Scrabble functions, but it feels more like a project done to prove to Hasbro that EA was the right company to which to license the game. It is not a pleasant experience if you’re used to Scrabulous or indeed if you’ve played the Scrabble board game.

I can imagine the dynamics of being the team tasked with developing the “official” game that will compete with the two brothers: “Oh, boy; We get to be the agents of the mammoth corporations that will crush the poor Indian brothers who stumbled into developing the version of Scrabble that everybody actually loves.” Wouldn’t you want to work on that team? Whatever the situation, the project went awry and it’s only amazing that the game got introduced to the public. It’s too bad that big companies get so wrapped up in themselves. Scrabulous should be the official version; it looks and feels and plays like Scrabble. Hasbro and Mattel should be thrilled that they could get such great development for one of their key brands without even trying.

They should have just rewarded the two brothers for their excellent work. Buy the darn thing and give the brothers millions of dollars for showing respect for the game. Instead, they tried to compete and now look like fools.

I love this quote from the news story I linked to above: “Mark Blecher, general manager for digital media and gaming at Hasbro, said his company has been working with EA to make the look and feel consistent across platforms, giving the authorized version what he called an advantage over Scrabulous.” Go ahead and tell me that the official Scrabble looks just like the board game and that that’s an advantage over Scrabulous. Whatever you do, don’t tell Mr. Blecher!

It is really interesting watching the progress of Facebook Platform, introduced just more than a month ago. We’ve been in the industry for more than two decades now and have seen a bunch of platforms be introduced, adopted and dispersed (well, not all of them actually achieved real adoption).

There’s a distinct pattern that you can observe for platform adoption and we’re willing to bet that it will be true for Facebook Platform too. It involves the following stages: 1) Introduction. Developers get excited and start building quick apps for the platform. 2) Customers use the applications and are disappointed. 3) Really motivated developers dig in and learn how to use the platform to do something really useful. 4) Outstanding new applications appear and generate significant growth. The time between 1) and 4) ranges from six months (new videogame machines, new internet APIs) to two years (new operating systems).

The very first instance of this phenomenon in my experience was VisiCalc for the Apple II. It was introduced more than two years after the first Apple II and transformed it into a growth phenomenon. The application developers didn’t really know what packaged software was: they had to learn how to program for the machine AND the operating system; they had to watch other programmers write software that didn’t work; and they had to get enough experience with the system to be able to come up with new ideas.

The first applications for Facebook are pretty disappointing. Most of the applications are designed to promote the self interest of the developer rather than provide real service to users. Some of the worst even make you leave Facebook and go to the developers web site to actually do anything. Users are too smart to adopt this kind of lazy or sloppy application design.

The newest phenomenon (all of four weeks after introduction!) is watching Facebook users remove applications because the apps don’t do enough to even take up screen space in the left column of the Facebook home page (stage 2 of the process of adoption). Invisible to most of us (so far) are the developers who are really digging in to figure out how to exploit Facebook. If my schedule is right, their apps should start showing up between Thanksgiving and Christmas.

What are successful Facebook apps going to look like? Everybody is trying to figure that out! There are always a couple of key aspects to the apps that really define a new platform: The one aspect I know will be true is that great apps will break the rules. For instance, current Facebook apps require installation for a user to see what they do. I’ve stopped installing apps that don’t explain themself before installation; I’ve already learned to distrust Facebook application developers and get conservative about trying new apps! I’m betting that someone will figure out how to get around that rule pretty soon, so they can gain adoption without having to force installation.
Bottom line: Facebook has all the look and feel of a major new platform, but we probably won’t see what it can do until developers have had the time and discipline to really tear the platform apart and introduce major new ideas. And that means developers have another five months to get it right.

We need more geeks. Personally, we love geeks. But the truth is that geeks are critical to our country’s economic and technical excellence.

Last year, the National Academies of Science and Engineering published a report called “Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future.” The premise of the report is that the United States is being challenged in science and technology by global competitors such as China, India, Israel and the European Union. China’s universities graduate more than 600,000 people every year in engineering, computer science, and information technology; U.S. universities graduates 222,000 people every year in the same majors. Our ability to build and fuel great innovative companies is based in the quality of our workforce. Ask any high tech CEO and he or she will tell you they are challenged to fill their technical and engineering positions. It’s not just a question of cost, but of the quality and quantity of potential domestic candidates.

The issue is complex and involves our attitudes toward the rest of the world, during a time when the rest of the world isn’t so happy with us. We need to work to solve that and make it easier for those smart graduates from other countries come here to invent new stuff. But the United States also needs to put science back into our own classrooms.

I propose a simple solution: add science to the SAT Reasoning Test test along with reading, writing, and math. By making science a required subject for testing prior to admission to college, we would ensure that all of America’s college students would be grounded with a solid science foundation and would encourage a greater number of college students to major in science and technology fields.