Yeah, I know you thought I abandoned this, but you were wrong. To close out the year (and to give you folks something to read while I finish up scripts), tMR is listing the "Top 20 Trends of 2007". But I need your help putting them in order. This'll be done with a cool poll you can vote on. And there will be prizes. I'm serious. If you have a suggestion for a trend, email me.
2007: A Ten Letter Word for Facebook
Sure, Facebook's awesome -- it's 99.9% less ugly than MySpace, you're not bombarded by girls in bikinis offering you Macy's discount cards and it's not, as of yet, owned by Rupert Murdoch. But as cool as that newsfeed is and as much as we love being bitten by vampires, zombies and werewolves, the killer app for Facebook is
Scrabulous.
Scrabulous is , as you may have guessed-- a game that resembles the Parker Bros. game Scrabble to a degree that Parker Bros. could sue if it wasn't for the excellent P.R. the online game gives to the real thing. Created by Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, two Indian graduate students; Scrabulous has been around for two years at its own site. But it's the Facebook incarnation of the game that's become fantastically addictive, gaining the attention of both The
Wall Street Journal and the
New York Times. The brothers run both incarnations as a hobby.
Why? Playing Scrabulous on Facebook is a lot like playing Scrabble in real life-- it takes some degree of concentration, you can chat with the other players and you can make a move in under five minutes, usually. It's the perfect work time distraction: you get your mind off the task at hand, get to socialize, but it's not very committing. Chatting online and browsing the web are popular Internet work distractions, but can easily become time sinks; while you could still waste your time at Scrabulous, the turn-based nature of the game makes it more difficult to do so. At the very least, it's more fun than listening by the water cooler to your co-worker talk about his bender last night; more efficient, too. You can tell your boss I said so.
Labels: 2007, new media
