By Parveen Chopra, IANS
New York : A faster version of Scrabulous, developed by two Kolkatans, has been uploaded on Facebook that sees half a million daily users of the Scrabble-like game. The US social networking site has also opened up the game and other plug-in applications to its competitors.
Released by brothers Jayant and Rajat Agarwalla, two software developers, on Facebook in June, the game’s popularity prompted the new version to make match uploads faster for the online players.
Through Scrabulous, “we have managed to reach a lot of people who have never played the game”, said Rajat, 26.
Scrabulous earns the Agarwalla brothers over $18,000 a month and they plan further upgrades, including video lectures about the game.
They are also preparing a chess application for Facebook.
Longtime fans of Scrabble, the Agarwallas developed its online version and put it on their website bingobinge.com in 2005, and on scrabulous.com a year later.
Meanwhile, Facebook has recently said in a significant announcement to its third-party developers that its platform is now open to anyone, even arch-rival MySpace.
This is seen as a response to the criticism that Facebook was too closed since it had kept applications written for Facebook – like FunWall, iLike and Vampires besides Scrabulous – accessible only to Facebook users.
The announcement also puts paid to Google’s planned OpenSocial as a platform where software developers could write plug-in programmes that were supported by all social networks, instead of picking sides.
Facebook is headquartered in Palo Alto, California.