Ever since Facebook Applications exploded onto the scene, there has been a problem. Well, I say it’s a problem, but in reality it is actually an amazing thing. It is only perceived to be a problem by old fashioned companies that just Don’t Get It.

For several months now the old Scrabulous saga has been playing out. Some smart guys thought it would be a great idea to be able to play Scrabble with your friends on Facebook. They were right. It became Facebook’s most popular application, and could even count Mark Zuckerberg among its users.

Unfortunately, the creators of Scrabulous didn’t own the intellectual property to the game. The people who do own the IP, Hasbro and Mattel, have gone on the assault. They are suing Scrabulous’s creators Rajat Agarwall and Jayant Agarwall. This is despite the fact that the brothers have undoubtedly done more than anyone else in recent years to raise the profile of Scrabble.

Do you think if Hasbro and / or Mattel had created a Facebook Application for Scrabble it would have been as successful as Scrabulous? I, for one, highly doubt it. Their reaction alone has demonstrated that they simply don’t “get” the internet. Just like the recorded music industry before them, board game companies, it seems, have woken up to find that the internet has eaten away at their old fashioned business model. They don’t know how to capitalise on the internet. It needn’t necessarily be a threat. But their head-in-the-sand behaviour ensures that it will be.

My personal pet theory is that old companies got far too cosy in the 20th century ways. With the intellectual property rights wrapped up, they have seen no need to innovate. They have rested on their laurels. As such, their products have stagnated. Remember, the optimal length of copyright is around 15 years. A similar length will apply to intellectual property. Scrabble can trace its history back to four times that length.

As was pointed out on the Freakonomics blog earlier this year, Mattel’s and Hasbro’s plans for the future of Scrabble are pretty lame to say the least.

The plans include adding anniversary labels to Scrabble packaging and introducing a folding edition of the deluxe Scrabble board.

In the meantime, the best thing to happen to Scrabble in generations is being targeted by Hasbro and Mattel simply because they were not smart enough to come up with the idea in the first place. They should have applauded and endorsed Scrabulous. That way, they would have ended up with a hell of a lot more respect and almost certainly more sales than under the current strategy of the companies.

In the latest stage of their assault, Mattel have finally launched their own ‘official’ Scrabble Facebook Application. But The Guardian reports that all is not well. And yet again, the problem can be laid at the door of intellectual property rights.

Seemingly, the new ‘official’ application is only endorsed by Mattel — not Hasbro. This means that you can not play Scrabble in the USA or Canada, where Hasbro own the rights. For this reason alone, the trust of Facebook’s users has been lost. If you can’t even play against your friends just because they happen to live in North America, why would you bother defecting from Scrabulous which currently has approximately 700,000 “daily active users”?

Today another Facebook Application has been hit by a similar corporate strangling. This time it is from a company that you would think would be able to cope with new technologies better.

Tetris Tournament was an early Facebook hit, and one of my favourite Facebook apps. It didn’t take long for its name to change to BlockStar, but it was still clearly derived from Tetris. The game itself was a bit clunky, but it did the job and was good fun.

Today it has become “Tetris Friends (formerly Block Star)“. Yes, it is now an official Tetris app. So, is this simply BlockStar with a shiny Tetris logo over the top? Far from it. The new game is utter, utter shit. Amazing when you consider that it is actually the official Tetris game. The original is a classic. This is a big pile of flaming hairy balls.

For one thing, the game now only lasts a maximum of two minutes. That’s right. No new levels. No game over as you reach the top. Just a high score after two minutes. It is ready to finish just when you get into the groove. Meanwhile, the graphics are cluttered and confusing. This game is intensely unsatisfying.

The reviews agree. The application’s wall has become a stream of obscenities while the reviews section has turned into a mere succession of one-star ratings.

In this respect, the users of Scrabulous have got off very lightly indeed. The best Tetris app on Facebook has been mauled out of all recognition.

I hope you all managed to have a good Christmas. I have to say, I can’t remember the last time I enjoyed Christmas so much.

In recent years I have enjoyed it just as a nice day off with a big meal. But beyond that I didn’t enjoy them much more than a normal day of leisure. So maybe I’d watch my new DVDs, but I would probably spend a great deal of the day on the internet anyway.

Perhaps it is because I have had such a tough year (not emotionally tough, but physically and mentally). Maybe it was because last year my brother wasn’t here, but it was probably mostly because I have become older, jaded and cynical.

Of course, when you’re young, Christmas is probably the most exciting part of the year. All those presents! Unfortunately as you get older this wears off. One day you find that you have the responsibility to give presents as well, with all the shopping hell that entails. And soon enough you might be earning enough to buy pretty much all of the luxuries you want.

For that reason, I always tell my parents to try and surprise me. They still want me to write them a list of what I want, but that is rubbish. Normally if I want stuff I can just buy them anyway. So I find myself not buying things just so that I can put them on my Christmas list. What a load of old bum. What is the point of knowing what you are getting anyway?

So I was quite pleased when my parents decided to buy me a poker set, which I completely didn’t expect. I didn’t even realise the big box was meant to be for me, so I just left it at first.

Apparently my father didn’t really want to get me it in case it encourages me to gamble. I think that’s a bit rich coming from someone who spends £2 on the lottery every week, but there you go! I doubt I’d ever gamble myself. I am pretty risk-averse and the odds are always stacked against you.

I have kind of hinted at getting a poker set before, but only as a sort of “ooh, wouldn’t that be amusing” kind of thing. I wasn’t dead serious about getting one. But I found myself getting quite excited about it, and we all played a game later in the evening.

I had never played a game of poker before, and I knew very little about it. All I knew was whatever I gleaned from watching Late Night Poker back in the day, which was very little. I only ever watched that because there was nothing else on, and I was mesmerised by the amazing under-the-table cameras.

My brother led us all by the hand, explaining the rules as we went along. My parents were knocked out quickly, and it was just the young’uns — me, my brother and his girlfriend — left. Time flew by really quickly. Before we realised it, three hours had passed and it was after midnight.

And in the end, I won my first ever game of poker! Muhahah!

And this evening, I won at Scrabble. This is in stark contrast to my record on Facebook Scrabble (won 2, lost 8). This winning streak is unusual, because normally I am just one big loser. I should ride the wave and carry these optimistic feelings with me into 2008. It’s a big year, so being optimistic is probably the only way I can get things done from now on, even though it goes against my instincts.

What else did I get for Christmas? Well, most of the other stuff was on my list. A few books to add to the ever-growing pile of books I haven’t yet got round to reading. Jackie Stewart’s autobiography (very hefty looking and thorough — unlike Lewis Hamilton, Jackie Stewart has lived a life), The Long Tail and Dead Children Playing.

My brother got me Dead Children Playing, although I had already bought it for myself and had got it wrapped up. Amusingly, I bought it partly as a backup for my brother in case I couldn’t find him anything better (eventually I got him this). That we both got it for each other is a sign that it was a good present, I think. We are keeping a copy each.

I also got a few DVDs — the F1 season review, 30 Century Man (a documentary about Scott Walker) and Taking Liberties (a documentary about Tony Blair riding roughshod over the constitution).

I have just watched Taking Liberties and I can very much recommend it. It concisely documents what is happening to this country under the Labour government and why it matters. It demonstrates that this affects a wide range of people and includes interviews from critics of the government across the political spectrum, from all of the major parties. If you don’t recognise the loss of freedoms that is happening in this country, you should watch this film and you will soon enough understand.

The film looks as though it’s only half of the story as well, because taking a look at the list of DVD extras, there is lots more to get through.

Back to normal tomorrow I think. I decided — two days off: Christmas Day and Boxing Day. But deadlines loom. Back to writing essays and dissertations tomorrow.

Sorry about my absence over the weekend. I was here all along. In fact, I was here more than usual. It was one of the least busy weekends I’ve had in a while. But I somehow misplaced my blogging mojo and I was distracted by other things.

Other things like my latest internet addiction, Scrabulous! Jeremy Bentham thought that humans wanted to maximise pleasure rather than pain. Goodness knows what he would have thought if he saw me inviting Facebook friends to play Scrabble against me.

It has mostly been a demoralising affair. I hadn’t realised quite how rusty I was at Scrabble. I knew it was bad when I changed my target in my games to staying within 100 points of my opponent. Apologies to everyone who has had to put up with my awful Scrabble standards.

Still, I did win one game. I got off to a good start with ‘zealot’ early on, but I fell behind. Just when it was looking beyond hope, I redeemed myself with — of all words — ‘pies’. I always knew they were good for you really.

It’s incredible to think about the popularity of the Scrabulous Facebook application. I would never have heard of Scrabulous if it wasn’t for Facebook even though Scrabulous must have been in existence for a while.

This is part of the genius of Facebook Applications. They realised that there is added utility in combining other websites with Facebook. For instance, with the Last.fm Facebook apps I can see the music that all of my friends are listening to — people who I didn’t necessarily know had a Last.fm profile. With Scrabulous I can instantly play games of Scrabble with my friends without having to sign up or track down my friends.

All this has got me thinking about Facebook Applications again. When they were launched at the beginning of the summer, it felt as though there could be two or three really good uses for it, but that it could lead to the kind of overload that makes MySpace unbearable.

Now my profile has 14 apps on it (not including the ones made by Facebook themselves) and rising. Some are trivial. Others are distracting. The best are nigh-on revolutionary.

Perhaps with the latter group of applications in mind, Facebook themselves appear to have taken a bit of a step back. One annoying move they have recently made has been to call their excellent Courses feature an application and promptly remove it. I still don’t understand the justification for it.

For students like myself (who, after all, Facebook was originally designed for), the courses feature was not a mere add-on service. It was practically integral to the website as it allowed you to easily find your classmates.

Now it has been ripped out and replaced with at least two different applications (and probably more in the future). And because different people will be using different applications (or none at all), now you won’t be able to find your classmates so easily. Not the smartest move by Facebook if you ask me.

I wonder quite why Facebook felt the need to pull out. Maybe they are feeling the heat of the spotlight a bit too much. It’s not good to be the top dog. Ask McDonald’s, CocaCola, Microsoft or (now) Google. These companies all receive exponentially more flack than whoever is on the next rung down. Facebook is dangerously close to being among them.

By passing on responsibility for so much of its functionality to third parties, at least Facebook can now attempt to divert the attention elsewhere. If somebody launches into some kind of tirade about privacy and the courses feature, Facebook can now say, “Don’t look at us — it was [third party application developer].”

Perhaps there are less sinister reasons for Facebook’s change in tack though. A new application is causing a bit of a buzz and it is putting Facebook itself to shame (via Martin Stabe).

I have written in the past about how Facebook’s geographical networks are woefully inadequate. Basically, they have plucked some major cities from the atlas and decided that that will do. There are only 17 geographical networks for the UK, and they are almost all major cities.

If you are in Scotland you have to choose from Aberdeen, Dundee, Edinburgh or Glasgow. Tough luck if you live in the Western Isles or even Fife, a peninsula wedged in between two of the aforementioned cities.

The rather excellent looking Neighborhoods app cuts out all of this nonsense. It makes these geographical networks for you. I added the app and it created a Kirkcaldy network for me, just like that! It has its own network-style page.

Of course, the problem with this is that the network is extremely small compared to, for instance, the Edinburgh one. In fact, I am the only member. But perhaps the tight-knit nature of these networks will work to its advantage. If the Neighborhoods app takes off (as it apparently has in Seattle), it could prove to be just the ticket. A simple solution to an old problem that Facebook themselves didn’t have a solution for.

It feels like a good time for me to review some of my favourite Facebook apps. But that will come tomorrow.