Last.fm, iLike, Networked Blogs, Causes and any of the hundreds of third-party apps you may have incorporated into your Facebook Profile page are no longer there. As I wrote about last month, Facebook’s customizable profile experiment was short-lived even if its demise took over a year.

Before this weekend, if you added approved third-party applications to your Facebook profile, many would have the option of adding to your wall or as a profile tab. The default selection would be to your Boxes tab. Today, even the Boxes tab is missing the apps that you used / played with / were annoyed by over the past couple years. From NY times Quiz, to How big of a Cubs fan are you?, To Myflickr, finetune, and everything else under the sun: Gone. Granted, the Boxes tab on my profile used to run on and on and pretty certain that nobody ever checked it out (myself included). Now the Boxes tab shows nothing more than I’m allowed to display on my profile tabs: the Facebook proprietary applications “Video” “Photos” and tabs for “Links” I share, “Notes” I write or import from this blog via RSS, Events, and Questions. The Boxes column is much narrower and ads have returned.

It’s been fun taking advantage of Facebook’s more open experiments over the past couple years but now our Facebook profiles have returned to their original states as rather vanilla bulletin boards.

That said, if I do want to customize my online profile and incorporate apps and even add raw html… there’s always Myspace!

Without meaning to be too critical — I’m just sayin’. And, as long as I can have this badge on my wall it would be nice if my friends could still use it to click through and learn more about the, uh, Cause!

Posted via email from Andy Sternberg’s posterous

Either way, before bothering to read the articles on the first-ever Hasbro-licensed online Scrabble game (in both the NY Times and Mashable), I figured I’d just launch right into it. I never imagined it would stack up in anyway to Scrabulous, but, as a Social Media experiment, felt it was my duty to at least try it.

Not until AFTER I installed the App on my profile do I get the following message:

The Scrabble legacy is a complicated one. Turns out Mattel has worldwide distribution rights, ex-US and Canada, whereas Hasbro controls the game in North America, as Rafat Ali explained at PaidContent. Mattel partnered with Real Networks last year to produce “casual games,” and purportedly either take over, co-opt, or otherwise undo Scrabulous, however, Hasbro, for its share, has a conflicting digital agreement with Electronic Arts.

I’m not gonna lie about my location just to play your silly game — after all, I’ve got the deluxe, tangible edition right here. Just please don’t make Scrabulous go away!