Mattel Launches SCRABBLE® Facebook App Outside North America

Talk about late to the game and then having the table pulled out from under you. What’s the point? Just gauging the interest? Still in cahoots with the developers of Scrabulous or perhaps working on some sort of partnership / licensing agreement?

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:

scrabble facebook app

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!

BuzzNet Gets Up to $25 Million + Stereogum

I began this post months ago and never posted it. Now it’s all but confirmed that BuzzNet FULLY owns Stereogum and on top of that Just received up to $25 million in funding. This according to Rafat Ali of paidcontent who is sitting right next to me at the Community Next conference.

We have confirmed through sources that Buzznet now fully owns Stereogum. Not sure how this plays into the new funding, but the financing may be used in making some other music and entertainment related content acquisitions and possibly rollups, our sources say.

UPDATE: Mashable is reporting that Buzznet has also acquired QLoud, the Steve Case-backed music network seen on Facebook and elsewhere.

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Is Ping.fm a Lame Data-Mining Op? Or is it Just Annoying?

go away pingfmSomeone seriously has to cut the noise around here. I signed up for the Ping.fm Beta because, well, I love signing up for betas for no particular reason.

Right off the bat I knew this service was totally pointless. Why would I want to post the same message to 5 or 6 different social networks at the same time? So my friends that are also on one, two or six of the same networks hear me like a broken record? I knew it was dumb, but thinking that — just maybe — someday it could be useful, I signed up, with no intention to actually use it (I’ve done similar thing with Digg, Yelp, GrandCentral and more — signing up early and not really using until I trusted the service.

ping.fm is a scam
ping.fm is a scam

It hasn’t been an hour, though, and I am trying to close my Ping.fm account, but there is no apparent way to opt-out once you sign up (though I did change my account e-mail to no@than.ks). Unfortunately, it’s already too late — they immediately spammed my Pownce and Twitter account with the messages above. THEN, I read their Terms of Service (I know, I shoulda known better) and realized that this was the operation of two kids who likely were more interested in purging people’s data from multiple social websites than actually providing a useful service.

Don’t get me wrong: I have no problem with throwing myself out on the Internet in all transparency and am fully aware of the risks therein. But I hate to see myself and my friends get not only spammed (by each other) but also punked by signing up for a seemingly legitimate service (see Mashable‘s review today). Before we get into the small print, let’s just look at the “company” behind Ping.fm.

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