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'Scrabble' maker Hasbro sues over 'Scrabulous'

This is the lawsuit we all knew was coming: Hasbro, which sells the Scrabble board game, has sued to shut down the wildly popular knockoff on Facebook called Scrabulous.

Hasbro on Thursday filed a copyright and trademark lawsuit in New York against the creators of the ad-supported Scrabulous application, which boasts an astonishing half-million daily users.

Mark Blecher, general manager for Hasbro Digital Media, said in a telephone interview that his employer's goal is to promote its authentic, legitimate Facebook application. "This is theft of intellectual property," Blecher said of Scrabulous. "It's really no different … Read more

Astronaut reveals that aliens have better technology than humans

There are people who think human beings are smart. (Mostly, they are second-rate CEOs and they are thinking of themselves.)

And there are those of us, and I include astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell amongst our august number, who can attest than humans are, in psychological and technological terms, worms.

Dr. Mitchell, who was possessed of the gumption to set foot on Apollo 14 after the disaster of the previous mission, had the even greater gumption to reveal the truth about alien life to Kerrang Radio this week.

If you have not heard of Kerrang Radio, it is, in essence, a … Read more

Facebook applications finally grow up

I've long been a critic of Facebook: too noisy, too superficial, too cluttered. This week, however, Facebook revealed plans to promote a range of new applications that are (gasp!) useful and not designed to simply occupy one's time for a few seconds. According to a New York Times article:

Frustrated (by "trivial applications that have clogged the site"), Facebook has tried to counter that and put more emphasis on significant and trustworthy applications...Facebook announced a series of new incentives for developers to write what it characterized as "meaningful" tools for the service. It … Read more

Connected Weddings does your seating chart for you

My favorite app concept from the Facebook F8 Developers' Conference was Connected Weddings. Based on the fact that planning a wedding is a social affair (duh), it lets you connect with two different groups: the people coming to your event, and other people who are getting married. With the former, you can share stories and photos. With the latter, you can talk about your plans and get advice. But that's not the cool thing.

What I really like is that Connected Weddings will create seating charts for your wedding reception, based on the Facebook connections between your invitees. You … Read more

Facebook opens up with Connect

Mark Zuckerberg today officially rolled out Facebook Connect, a way for apps not on the Facebook Platform to leverage the Facebook social network. It's an extremely powerful idea, and the demos we saw at the F8 conference were much more impressive than the MySpace Data Availability project that rolled out yesterday.

Facebook Connect allows other Web sites and apps to have their users log in, or authenticate, to the Facebook system, and once logged in, their social network comes with them. The reason it's a bigger deal than Data Availability is that it's two-way. Not only does … Read more

Report: Facebook growing faster than MySpace

MySpace is still the top dog among social networks in the United States, according to researcher Hitwise, but its No. 2 rival Facebook is gaining fast.

MySpace attracted as much as 73 percent of U.S. visitor market share for social networks in June, down by 6 percent from the same period last year, according to a report released Wednesday from Hitwise. Facebook, its more staid social rival, lured about 17 percent of the U.S. market, up 40 percent from June 2007.

It's still a wide margin, but Facebook's threat looms large. And Facebook's COO Sheryl Sandberg emphasized this week … Read more

Live blog: Facebook 'F8 08' keynote

Facebook is hosting its second F8 developers' conference today in San Francisco. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is giving the keynote 1:30 p.m. PDT. I'm in the audience and have live coverage of his talk. See below; I'll go live when he takes that stage. Facebook is also hosting a video stream.

Highlights of the talk will likely be Facebook's new design, a discussion on openness, mobility, monetization, and a new tiered system to give some apps more access to Facebook users' data than others.

Facebook virtual goods turning into real money

Who would have thought that virtual pets would be the thing that lets independent developers monetize the Facebook audience.

Over on VentureBeat, Eric Eldon pulls in some great stats on users and monetization of Facebook apps.

Like grizzled miners panning for gold on a river high in the Sierras, Facebook applications developers have been toiling away, trying to figure out how to make money from the millions of people who use their apps every day. Those developers who focus on games are starting to find gold -- by which I mean revenue gained from doing things like selling virtual goods … Read more

Zynga snags $29 million in VC funding

Zynga, which specializes in games for social-networking sites, has received $29 million in a new funding round led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Institutional Venture Partners.

The round, announced Wednesday, also includes funding from previous investors Union Square Ventures, Foundry Group, and Avalon Ventures.

Zynga, based in San Francisco and started by Tribe.net social-network founder Mark Pincus, added that Bing Gordon, a Kleiner Perkins partner and former chief creative officer of Electronic Arts, is joining Zynga's board. Zynga also announced its acquisition of YoVille, which it describes as the "largest virtual world game on social … Read more