billso.com

I’m back in Honolulu after my conference, and I am catching up with my social media sites today. Some of the sites have reasonable mobile versions, so I was able to post updates and stay current through my phone or my iPod’s WiFi connection:

• Facebook
• Plurk
• FriendFeed
• Twitter

At least one of my sites offer mobile versions with very limited feature sets:

• LinkedIn offers a contact list. On an iPod Touch, it’s a little clumsy to use. Other than that, there’s hardly any useful content available. 

For the last few months, I’ve been involved in Charles Wankel’s latest crowdsourcing project. He’s leading a team of several hundred managers and scholars who will contribute to Managing Through Collaboration. The paper edition of the book will be published in January 2010 by Routledge.

I’m editing Chapter 22 on information technology and e-business. Almost 400 of the contributors are at the Academy of Management meeting in Anaheim, and I’ve participated in several editor and chapter team meetings during the conference.

I’m also working on social media and a blog to support the project. Many of us are on LinnkedIn and Facebook, and I’m setting up a FriendFeed room for the project.

I’m flying to Anaheim this evening for the annual Academy of Management conference, along with 10,000 other management professors.

I’ll resume my daily blog posts on Monday, 18 August 2008. It’s not like there’s a daily quota or anything… although I’ve been posting an article a day for a while now. (See Relax, Bloggers: Nobody Is Keeping Score, and There’s No Quota.)

In the meantime, I’ll be on email, Facebook, FriendFeed and my other haunts.

Ryan Ozawa, one of our better-known bloggers on Oahu, invited me to this month’s Manoa Geeks meeting, which will be held at the HMSA building in Honolulu tonight. Details are available here.

This year I’ve set up some landing pages for my social networking services:

• A Facebook page with an expanded badge that lists my recent blog articles, and a list of my posts about Facebook
• A FriendFeed page that lists my activity on that service and several other social networking services. I have discovered FriendFeed groups on Facebook and LinkedIn, too.
• A LinkedIn page with my profile badge and my articles about LinkedIn, the most popular of all the professional social networks right now.

Rajat and Jayant Aggarwalla have blocked access to their Scrabulous Facebook app for US and Canadian users, according to this NY Times article called Scrabulous Barred to North American Users and anAssociated Press article called Popular Scrabble knockoff suspended on Facebook. There are lots of blog posts available, including my own billso.com post called Scrabble vs Scrabulous, Mashable’s Actually, Scrabulous Shut Themselves Down. Sort of., eFlux Media’s Scrabulous is no more and Marketing Shift’s Facebook Shutters Scrabulous; Hasboro Smiles. (Note: the spelling error was made by Marketing Shift, not me.)

It sounds like Facebook asked the brothers to take this step, after multiple requests from Hasbro.

Some Facebook users really need a lesson on copyright as well. Scrabulous may be fun, but the online groups that are defending the game are displaying their ignorance and contempt for intellectual property laws. It wouldn’t surprise me if many of Facebook Scrabulous players also downloaded unlicensed movies, songs and books from peer-to-peer services. I disucssed textbook downloading on yesterday’s billso.com post called A torrent of textbooks.

Perhaps some Scrabulous users will actually try to play Scrabble in real life, while Hasbro and Electronic Arts try to get their licensed Facebook Scrabble app to run in a reliable manner.

I’m a big fan of fair use and the Creative Commons, but I really hope Hasbro and Mattel pursue their court cases. The brothers are several weak arguments in their defense, and have shown poor judgment by collecting advertising revenue from their web site.  A settlement would set an ugly precedent, and encourage more developers to create unlicensed versions of copyrighted works.

Related posts on billso.com

• Copyright and fair use
• Creative Commons
• 8 July 2008: Scrabble vs Scrabulous
• 11 March 2008: Widgets won’t work without a plan
• 25 February 2008: Social media 101
• 19 February 2008: Social media gets too sticky
• 4 February 2008: Better than free
• 28 January 2008: Crazy money
• 3 January 2008: Impression management and Facebook
• 5 October 2007: What’s wrong with copyright
• 17 July 2007: A quick explanation of copyright law
• 10 August 2007: Forty-somethings flock to Facebook
• 20 June 2007: Facebook vs MySpace
• 29 September 2006: US copyright law in verse
• 5 August 2006: Isolated Americans trying to connect