Social Network

Already blocked from Facebook users in the United States and Canada, Scrabulous — the online imitation of the popular Scrabble board game — has been yanked by Facebook in all other countries except India in response to a copyright tussle over the game.

Facebook said Monday it decided to block access to Scrabulous throughout most of the world in response to a formal request to do so from Mattel, which owns the rights to Scrabble outside North American.

Scrabulous’ developers Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla of Calcutta — removed the game from Facebook in North America three weeks ago, in response to a federal suit filed in New York by Hasbro, which owns rights to Scrabble in the U.S. and Canada,

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New independent data shows Facebook enjoyed 153 percent growth year over year, while MySpace remains essentially flat. The site’s growth is biggest overall outside of the US. Overall, Facebook attracted 132.1 million unique users in June, compared to 117.6 million for MySpace, according to data from comScore released this week. Another site that saw impressive growth was Hi5, which doubled its unique userbase to 56.4 million.

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Facebook has removed the popular word game Scrabulous from its U.S. and Canadian sites after Hasbro sued the online game makers.

The social networking site said Scrabulous creators Rajat Agarwalla and Jayant Agarwalla and their company RJ Softwares made the decision after Hasbro said Scrabulous infringes on its intellectual property by copying and threatening to diminish its Scrabble brand.

An online version of the original Scrabble board game is on Facebook, but members with U.S. or Canadian profiles who try to play Scrabulous get a message saying the game has been disabled for users in those two countries until further notice. The message allows users to click on a link to “stay informed.” The link leads to an e-mail form for receiving updates from Scrabulous.

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The leader of a youth movement that swept the world this past year by encouraging Web users to share bits of their lives with selected friends spoke on Wednesday of spreading his service across the Web, even while apologizing for past excesses.

Mark Zuckerberg, 24, told an audience of 1,000 industry executives, software makers, media — and his mother and father — at Facebook’s annual conference of how the company’s features will run on affiliated sites outside its own.
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At Facebook’s f8 developer conference, the company announced some initiatives to improve the quality of applications on its site, but it may have disappointed developers by making no significant new additions to the platform. Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg kicked off Wednesday’s event by acknowledging that Facebook has made mistakes in the year since it threw its site wide-open to third-party developers.”We haven’t done enough to reward the good applications or punish the applications that have just been abusive,” he told a crowded hall of developers in San Francisco’s South of Market district. “We’re going to have to find a way to ensure the applications that provide the most long-term value are the ones that are succeeding.”

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Popular social networking site MySpace said Tuesday it will join the open source authentication platform OpenID, further bolstering the idea of a unified system to carry online identities between Web sites. But for now, MySpace’s OpenID accounts cannot be used elsewhere.

OpenID has already been embraced by nearly 8,000 sites, including Yahoo (the largest supporter in terms of users), Plaxo, Wetpaint, Technorati, and LiveJournal. But MySpace is the second largest site to join the network to date, and will nearly double the amount of OpenID accounts to a half-billion. Although, because MySpace doesn’t require e-mail verification, many of its accounts may not be legitimate. continue

Facebook today is beginning to roll out a redesign aimed at simplifying the site and giving users more control over their profiles. The new version of the site has been in the works for some time now, and Ars Technica went hands-on to see how social and private the new design really is.

Announced in a press release, Facebook’s new design is slowly being rolled out to its 80 million users over the next few days. If you can’t wait to check it out for yourself, though, you can visit www.new.facebook.com with a registered account to gain access now. continue

This free mobile application, currently working on Windows Mobile operating system, offers full access to the users’ Facebook account.
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Social networking giant MySpace is set to receive $6 million for a lawsuit the company filed against “Spam King” Scott Richter, who inundated its members with unwanted spam from hijacked accounts in August 2006.Specifically, an arbitrator decided Friday that Richter and his company, Media Breakaway, was to fork over $4.8 million in fines and a $1.2 million in legal fees to MySpace for the case that originated in January 2007.

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Facebook is releasing as open-source software parts of its application development platform in order to make it easier for programmers to create applications for the social-networking site, the company announced Monday.

Facebook will offer as open source “most” of the code that runs its platform, plus implementations of its most popular methods and tags.

This is another step in Facebook’s program for external developers, which it kicked off a little over a year ago when it opened up its platform to them. Since then, about 400,000 developers have created some 24,000 applications for Facebook.

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NEW YORK — Online social networking today is more about hanging out with friends behind gated communities than exploring the World Wide Web: Visit another site and you’ll have to rebuild your profile from scratch.

That’s like having to get a new driver’s license for every state you drive through.

Although the walls that keep users from taking their data wherever they go are starting to erode, how much three recently announced programs will help users move among the networks remains to be seen. Google’s attempt to break those fortifications was quickly blocked by Facebook.

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Comcast is adding a social dimension to its services through the acquisition of Plaxo, a deal the two companies announced Wednesday afternoon.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the purchase price is thought to be in the $150 to $170 range.

The acquisition is a big win for Plaxo, whose Pulse social network service, with 1.5 million active monthly users, has been overshadowed by the likes of Facebook and MySpace. It’s a smart move by Comcast, which can enhance the user experience across its 14 million high-speed Internet subscribers, 3 million voice customers, and 24.2 million cable subscribers.

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