All Things Digital

Hasbro has finally dropped the hammer on Scrabulous, the online knockoff of its 75 year-old word game. On Thursday, the company filed suit against Scrabulous creators Jayant and Rajat Agarwalla, claiming trademark and copyright infringement. “Hasbro has an obligation to act appropriately against infringement of our intellectual properties,” said Barry Nagler, Hasbro’s general counsel, in a statement. “We view the Scrabulous application as clear and blatant infringement of our Scrabble intellectual property, and we are pursuing this legal action in accordance with the interests of our shareholders, and the integrity of the Scrabble brand.”

An understandable view, I suppose. Scrabulous has well over 2 million users and was generating over $25,000 a month in revenue back in January. That said, Scrabulous could have been the perfect licensing opportunity for Hasbro, had the company decided to view it that way. Two million users and growing is a hell of a lot better than the 8,900 users the official Scrabble Facebook app has garnered since its launch earlier this month.

With Yahoo (YHOO) now just a collapsed and trembling form dwindling in Microsoft’s rearview mirror, the software giant has been anxiously searching out other ways to accelerate its stalled search business. And now it appears to have found one. On Thursday afternoon, Microsoft said it is expanding its relationship with Facebook to bring its Live search and search ads to the social-networking site. “One last thing I want to talk about is an extension of our Facebook relationship where we are extending it to search and page search,” Microsoft Senior Vice President Satya Nadella told attendees at Microsoft’s annual meeting for financial analysts. “We will be providing an API to Facebook where they will create a rich search experience for the Facebook users, and that is something that they will launch in the fall working with us. And it will carry both our Web results, as well as our page-search advertising. We are excited [about this] opportunity to further expand the Live Search reach.”

Financial terms of the deal, which follows Microsoft’s (MSFT) $240 million investment in Facebook last year, were not disclosed, but are presumably pretty favorable to the social-networking site.

According to popular legend, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg once kept two versions of his business card in his wallet–one with the title CEO, the other with “I’M CEO . . . BITCH.” Seems that before Facebook became the de facto platform of the attention economy, it was a platform for the attention-starved.

Well, there was no shortage of attention for the social-networking phenom Wednesday as it kicked off its second F8 conference in San Francisco. In a 90-minute keynote address, Zuckerberg–a spitting image of Judge Reinhold in “Fast Times at Ridgemont High”–offered up new details on Facebook’s new Great Apps program, the expansion of its Translation effort, and Facebook Connect, a service that will essentially transform a user’s Facebook profile into a portable Internet identity that can be extended to other Web sites. Also discussed: the company’s new mission statement and the first fruits of the fbFund, the $10 million reserve established last year to help finance new Facebook applications.

QOTD

I wish I knew.”

–Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on when we’ll see a Facebook payments platform

Looks like Facebook has finally gotten around to addressing the issue of the intrusive third-party applications so prevalent in its ecosystem. “We haven’t done enough to reward Facebook’s good citizens,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during his f8 keynote address Wednesday. “And we haven’t punished those that have abused the Facebook ecosystem.”

With that in mind, the company is incentivizing developers to create useful applications with its new Great Apps program. Great Apps, Ben Ling, head of Facebook Platform Product Marketing says, recognizes applications that are meaningful, trustworthy and well-designed. Apps that hew to Facebook’s “Guiding Principles for Great Applications” (see image below)–they must be “social, useful, engaging, expressive, secure, respectful, transparent, clean, fast and robust”–will be given greater visibility across the site and early access to new features. The first apps to be awarded that status: iLike and Causes.

Facebook, it should be noted, plans to aggressively police its site for apps that abuse user trust and will take “enforcement actions” if necessary.

“The majority of good applications will soon come from outside Facebook, not within it.” This according to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who announced the social network’s new “Connect” service at the company’s f8 conference today. Connect essentially allows Facebook users to authenticate into third-party Web sites using their Facebook accounts. So, for example, users could log onto a site like Digg with their Facebook identity without ever creating a new profile on Digg. “From the largest online destinations to the most obscure blog, Digg surfaces the best content as voted on by its community of 26 million,” said Digg founder Kevin Rose. “Facebook Connect will help us promote more conversations on Digg by giving Facebook’s 90 million users an opportunity to sign in to Digg with their Facebook accounts and become part of the active Digg community. This allows both Facebook and Digg users to more easily share the content they care about with the people they care about.”

Developer keys for Facebook Connect are available today. Apps should be rolling out soon.

Facebook said this afternoon that it is opening its Translation Application to any developer using Facebook Platform. Beginning today, all Facebook developers can make their applications available in any of the 20 languages currently available on Facebook. The company expects to add 69 more languages in the months ahead.

At precisely 1:35 p.m. Pacific time, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the guy “Rolling Stone” once described as a “Nietzschean superdork,” takes the stage and begins his address with a simple, unassuming “hey, guys.” He moves quickly on to the “Facebook Movement” and the company’s mission, which he defined while on his recent worldwide vision quest. According to Zuckerberg, Facebook’s mission is to “give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.”

Apparently, we’ve refined things a bit since D6 and that “Facebook is about helping people to share information and share themselves” episode.

“We want to define human presence and extend it,” Zuckerberg says. “We’re working to make the world a more open place. We’re working to make people have a more open connection with each other and the world around them … We’re making the world more transparent.”

Zuckerberg says Facebook’s goal is to highlight the good in people, cultivate it, and expose the bad. “Facebook is all about transparency,” he says. “It’s good for people to be good to each other.”

“It’s good for people to be good to each other.” Sort of like Google’s (GOOG) informal “Don’t be evil” motto, but sillier.

BoomTown was right, Facebook has scored itself a “golden geek.” TechCrunch claims that Netscape/Opsware/Ning founder Marc Andreessen will join Accel Partners’ Jim Breyer, Founders Fund’s Peter Thiel and, of course, founder Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook’s board of directors. Which makes perfect sense, really. After all, as BoomTown pointed out back in May, Andreessen is “the man who was Zuckerberg before Zuckerberg was cool.”

If Microsoft is buying, Facebook ain’t selling.

Commenting on rumors that Microsoft (MSFT) may soon acquire the 98.4% of the social-networking phenom that it doesn’t yet own, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he’d prefer to keep things as they are now. Said Zuckerberg, “You can tell, from our history and what we’ve done, that we really wanted to keep the company independent, by focusing on building and focusing on the long-term.”

And focusing too on that rumored IPO and the fantastical $15 billion valuation it’s supposed to bring with it.

(Image Credit: The Onion)

Google calls its latest data portability effort Friend Connect, but a better name might have been AdWords Connect. Because, like most Google (GOOG) initiatives, that’s really what it’s all about, isn’t it? Connecting people to ads? And there’s a lot more opportunity for that when the Web itself becomes a social network. Which is exactly the sort of thing you hope for when those unobtrusive little contextual ads you sell are as ubiquitous as street signs on the Web.

Designed to help Web publishers easily add social-networking features to their sites, Friend Connect requires just a snippet of code to bring social features to a site along with a means of coordinating them with other social networks like Facebook, Plaxo and Google’s Orkut. It’s another in a recent string of data-portability efforts that hope to apply the distributed model to social networking and put an end to its so-called “walled gardens.”

“The distributed model has worked well for the Web,” David Glazer, Google director of engineering, told Outside the Lines’ Dan Farber. “That is what the Web does–many points of light loosely coupled and massively distributed, allowing users to connect to pages of information. Now it is working to connect people to other people.”

And all of them to Google AdWords, of course. More Internet usage. More ad revenue.

If the defining characteristics of Web 2.0 are “groundbreaking” Facebook widgets, easy access to dumb capital and haughty start-ups dangerously over-leveraged on other companies’ assets what (or who) will define the Web 3.0 epoch?

The answer’s obvious isn’t it? Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff.

Why? Because he says so, that’s why.

Speaking at the company’s DreamForce Europe event, Benioff said that Web 3.0 will be the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) era. A fascinating definition–convenient too, since this is precisely the sort of business Salesforce.com (CRM) is in. “We think Web 3.0 is now upon us. It’s the era of platforms,” said Benioff. “New platforms are coming right out of the cloud. It’s time to make a choice. You can continue to build your applications in the software model or you can move your applications to the new model of cloud computing. There is a new way to build your applications.”

So Web 3.0 is not, as Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, once suggested, the semantic Web–”day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives handled by machines talking to machines.” Rather, it’s Web 2.0 with another 1.0’s worth of marketing BS. The “Whatever-I-Say-It-Is Web”–the “Al Franken Decade” of the Internet age.

Well, the “me” decade is almost over, and good riddance, and far as I’m concerned. … That’s right. I believe we’re entering what I like to call the Al Franken Decade. Oh, for me, Al Franken, the ’80s will be pretty much the same as the ’70s. I’ll still be thinking of me, Al Franken. But for you, you’ll be thinking more about how things affect me, Al Franken. When you see a news report, you’ll be thinking, ‘I wonder what Al Franken thinks about this thing?’, ‘I wonder how this inflation thing is hurting Al Franken?’ And you women will be thinking, ‘What can I wear that will please Al Franken?’, or ‘What can I not wear?’ You know, I know a lot of you out there are thinking, ‘Why Al Franken?’ Well, because I thought of it, and I’m on TV, so I’ve already gotten the jump on you.”