All Things Digital

Well, this certainly wasn’t what Hasbro had in mind when it sued Scrabulous for copyright infringement. No, I’d guess boycotts, malicious attacks on the official online version of Scrabble, and the rebirth of the knockoff of the classic board game under a new name were about the last things on Hasbro’s mind. Yanked from Facebook earlier this week in response to a legal request from Hasbro, Scrabulous has returned to the social network with a new name and a new look. Rebranded as Wordscraper, Scrabulous still recalls Scrabble, but with its new design and rules it may now be different enough from the board game to deflect Hasbro’s lawsuit.

“Copyrights are not supposed to protect board games,” intellectual property attorney Pete Kinsella told CNet News.com. “What copyrights protect is the expression of an idea rather than the idea itself. The law allows people to design around things, and particularly when there isn’t patent protection, the law has great incentive to design around things by making things somewhat different.”

Which is an unfortunate state of affairs for Hasbro (HAS): The newly launched Wordscraper has, in a very short time, already signed up 3,569 users. And it will surely gather more as word of its debut spreads. What will the game company do now? What will it do if Wordscraper’s creators release it as a true board game?

Soon Nokia mobile phone users will be able to tell people who don’t particularly care what they’re doing, where they’re doing it — not that they cared in the first place.

This morning Nokia (NOK) acquired location-based services venture Plazes, which has developed a sort of social GPS that allows users to tell one another where they are and what they’re doing. For Nokia, the acquisition is a way to add the elements of place and time to its Mosh social network. And for Plazes, which has no business model of which to speak, it’s a quick and easy way to get one.

“If all goes well, in the near future Plazes will be made available to millions of Nokia customers both online and on millions of mobile devices,” Plazes CEO Felix Petersen said in a post on the company’s blog. “Nokia is a perfect partner for us because they share our product vision and have the muscle to bring locative presence to hundreds of millions of people all over the world.”

Presumably the “They were actually willing to buy us” is implied.

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.

Who says Google (GOOG) is hoarding Silicon Valley’s tech talent? In August of 2007, Gideon Yu, a Valley train-hopper with stints at Yahoo (YHOO) and then YouTube, resigned from his position at the video-sharing site shortly after it was acquired by the search engine to become CFO of Facebook. A few months later, Benjamin “bling” Ling, described as one of “Larry and Sergey’s golden boys,” left Google to run Facebook’s platform program. Then this past March, Sheryl Sandberg, Google’s vice president of global online sales and operations, bailed to join the social network as chief operating officer. Ethan Beard, Google’s director of social media, followed shortly after, taking a job as Facebook’s director of business development.

Now another prominent Googler has train-hopped to the popular social-networking company as well. As first reported by BoomTown, Elliot Schrage, vice president of global communications and public affairs at Google, is leaving the search sovereign to become Facebook’s vice president of communications and public policy.

“[Elliot Schrage] will be responsible for developing the key messages we want people to understand about our products, our business and the growing global importance of social networking and what we do,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in an email to employees announcing the hire. “The goal here is to help people understand how the Internet can strengthen people’s relationships. Elliot will direct our efforts to work with users, media, governments and other entities around the world to ensure that Facebook’s policies are transparent, responsive, effective and are recognized as being those things. … This is a really important role for us and one that we’ve been trying to find the right person for a while. Elliot’s role will be critical to helping us scale based on our culture that values transparency, openness and honest internal communications.”

“Elliot’s role will be critical to helping us scale based on our culture that values transparency, openness, and honest internal communications”?

Clearly, Zuckerberg meant “build from the ground up a culture that values transparency, openness and honest internal communications.” Because it’s only been about six months since the Beacon fiasco, which demonstrated how grievously the company was lacking in those qualities (see “DiaperFetishFactory.com Is Sending a Story to Your Profile,” “Epicurious Has Added a Potential Privacy Violation to Your Facebook Profile,” “Fiascobook,” and “Fiascobook, Redux“).

Perhaps if Facebook recruits enough former Googlers, it too will be able to lay claim to a silly informal motto like “Don’t Be Evil.”

The ability to control how much information is available to the public has long been one of Facebook’s core principles. It was this very feature, for example, that Facebook used to distinguish itself from other social networks back when it first launched.

Of course, the ensuing years proved that protecting the privacy of its users was not exactly Facebook’s strong suit–especially when it came to digging up the advertising revenues necessary to justify its fantastical $15 billion valuation. There have been privacy issues with Facebook’s news-feed service, with its controversial Beacon advertising system, and with its terms of service, which granted popular applications access to far more personal user data than is necessary.

And now there’s another. A bug in permission restrictions in Facebook Groups allows members to upload content without first receiving permission from a Group admin. I know this firsthand, because over the past few days videos, photos and blog posts have been appearing on the All Things Digital Facebook Group, and neither Walt, Kara nor I–the only three people with admin privileges to the group–put them there (see screen below). Worse, while I was able to delete the photos and blog posts, I was unable to pull the videos off the page. There was no mechanism to remove them.

Worse still, the bug that makes this possible is not specific to the All Things Digital Facebook Group alone. It affects all Facebook Groups, site-wide.

We alerted Facebook to the issue and the company quickly identified the bug. Said spokesperson Brandee Barker: “Engineering has pushed out a fix that should go site wide shortly.”

UPDATE: Facebook engineers fixed the permissions bug, and we were able to remove the rogue videos from our page.

Frankly, I’m kind of appalled that they’re threatening me after the work I’ve done for them free of charge, but after dealing with a bunch of other groups with deep pockets and good legal connections including companies like Microsoft (MSFT), I can’t say I’m surprised. I try to shrug it off as a minor annoyance that whenever I do something successful, every capitalist out there wants a piece of the action.”

–Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, February 2004

The inane dispute over the provenance of Facebook is finally nearing resolution. According to the New York Times, Facebook is reportedly close to settling that pesky lawsuit that accused founder Mark Zuckerberg of lifting social network ConnectU’s source code and business plan when he worked for it as a programmer.

Terms of the settlement haven’t been disclosed, but one would imagine it involves a nice little financial windfall for the founders of ConnectU–brothers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and their colleague, Divya Narendra. Facebook’s certainly got the money to pay to make the suit go away and a very good reason to pay it. It would be poor form for the company to head into an IPO with its quaint little creation myth in dispute.

MySpace will soon be not just “a place for friends”, deceptively flattering photos, and seizure-inspiring Web page design, but a place for the music industry as well. This morning some major music companies struck a deal with the social network to create a music destination site. MySpace Music will be jointly operated by MySpace and Universal Music (VIV) (who’ve apparently settled their long-running copyright suit) and Sony BMG (SNE) and Warner Music Group (WMG). EMI hasn’t yet signed on, though sources involved in the negotiations tell The New York Times it will probably join soon making Myspace Music, in the words of MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe, a mega-music experience. ‘This is really a mega-music experience that is transformative in a lot of ways,” DeWolfe enthused. “It’s the first service that offers a full catalog of music to be streamed for free, with full community features, to be shared with all of your friends.”

The venture is a noteworthy step for the music industry–whose failure to embrace digital distribution early on has cost it dearly. And it’s one that could pay off. “MySpace has the audience and environment to enable the music industry to get to the next digital level,” Forrester analyst James McQuivey told News.com. “What iTunes offers is a good buying experience but that’s not all people do with music. They they talk about it, they share it, they try things out. Remember, this is the kind of activity that (record label) Universal Music Group was suing MySpace for previously. I think the labels said to themselves,’Oh, if we enable fans to have a fully immersive experience, they might spend more on music. MySpace can offer a place where all aspects of the music experience can be expressed. Imeem was getting close to this, but MySpace, if they don’t mess it up, should take Music 2.0.”