I’m not really the Facebook type. My “UPenn Friends” list barely tops 100. My wall doesn’t get much play. I link to my posts, but only because my editors make me.

And when Facebook introduced all those applications, I got kind of overwhelmed and pissed off. One time I got a notification that someone thought I was sexy, but to see who it was I had to install the “Sexy Application.” Forget it, I thought. I can’t deal with that kind of cockteasing.

But just when I was about to disable my account, along came Scrabulous. Created by the brothers Agarwalla (network: India), it’s basically an un-investigated copyright infringement on Scrabble. Scrabulous is pretty popular — it boasts about 500,000 daily users.

But the real question is, does it make you smarter?

Imagine a world where you can fill that nasty Arts & Letters requirement by logging 50 hours of Scrabulous play. Imagine expanding your vocabulary and crushing your opponent at the same time. That would be like utopia.

But I have a bad feeling that Scrabulous has none of the educational assets that its offline cousin Scrabble does. Browsing the Scrabble Dictionary for words isn’t quite the same as sitting down and thinking. And whether you’re playing the bootleg version or the real thing, knowing words like “zuz” (Hebrew coin) and “qat” (Arabian shrub used for narcotics) isn’t really going to help you get an A on your paper.

Still, someone should do a study. Scrabulous can’t be any more useless than the Writing Requirement, right?

Tags: Facebook, Scrabulous

This entry was posted on Friday, November 16th, 2007 at 1:45 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.