It’s alive! It’s alive. Scrabulous closed its doors to North American players not even 48 hours ago. This brought to a seeming end the fun of tens of thousands of players.
Today a new application has appeared in place of Scrabulous; it’s called Wordscraper.
Look familiar? It should be.
The folks at Scrabulous have resurrected the game with a new name, but with some new play options. This isn’t your same old Scrabble game.
Players design their own board layout, placing letter and word multiplier tiles. Tiles can be tagged individually with either a word or letter multiplier with ranges from 2x to 5x. The play is still turn based, and scoring is done the same. Players even get seven tiles per round.
It will be interesting to see if folks will dive right back into the game or not. To make it easier, the Scrabulous application was automatically replaced by Wordscraper. It appears that active games may have been kept as well.
Bonus feature? Once you design a board layout, you can load that for future games. Check out this link to see my creation to a classic Scrabble layout.
Browzmi is the latest social networking plaything. And it’s a browser.
No, it’s not like Flock, the social browser that competes with IE and Firefox. It’s your browser in a browser tool, with built in social networking and sharing features.
Browzmi provides three panes to work in. The left is the My Stuff section. The center pane is the ‘browser’. The right pane is Explore More. Right and left sections are collapsable, with the center pane expanding to fill the screen space.
My Stuff contains four display choices: My Friends, Surf with Friends, My Favorites, and My Updates. Each of those selections pretty much shows what it’s titled. The Surf with Friends mode shows live updates as your friends navigate to new pages (i.e. friend updates stream).
Explore More also has several display modes: Where is Everyone, Related Photos, Related Videos, Updates on this Page. Where is Everyone displays a list by site of how many of your friends are on each site, and allows you to select that site and see just who is there. Related Photos provides related pictures from Flickr. This updates live as your browse to new pages. Likewise Related Videos does the same while drawing video results from YouTube.
Above the center pane is the little set of buttons shown above. These are fairly straightforward. Favorite however is where you are prompted to tag a web page. Clip allows you to clip out images. The thumbs up and down show the counts beside them, however I’m not sure how that affects things right now.
Want to jump in with some early players on Browzmi? Check out this Friendfeed thread with Browzmi links.
Please take the dive and give it a try. Registration takes seconds.
Koontz got your eye was a success. We have a winner! Andrea’s recommendation, Lightning, was the selected book.
Andrea has been sent an $8 gift Amazon gift certificate for her troubles. She was not only first, but suggested several good titles. To narrow the choice I read reviews of each book on Amazon. This gave me some insight on themes.
Lightning was chosen specifically at Andrea’s recommendation and that it involves a sci-fi theme. Koontz takes his spin on time travel.
Andrea, Tony Mast, Tracy Lee, Phil Baumann, and akaMonty, your support and suggestions were helpful. It took me some time to check out each one. The next in line will likely be Fear Nothing, a title recommended a couple of times.
The book is due to be shipped out on Monday. I’ll look forward to its arrival by Friday. Look for a review to follow.
Love Scrabble? Use Facebook? Then you were probably among the hundreds of thousands of players of Scrabulous. Scrabulous was the game of Scrabble online.
Scrabulous was well liked not only for being a fun take on a well known word game, but for it’s interface. Stripped of any pretense of wood and plastic, play was fast and easy. Without fancy graphics or spinning pixels, players could concentrate on the words.
It’s gone now. Gone that is for those in the US and Canada. The rest of the world can still play. For the rest though, they now have the ‘official’ Scrabble game on Facebook.
Yes. The game company Hasbro has brought out yet another version of Scrabble to enjoy. This one has more bells and whistles. Sound effects and spinning pixels are there to spare.
According to the message above, Hasbro is looking at making some of those things optional. This will probably affect the number of folks that become regular players. But will that and speedier play be enough to move the masses that played on Scrabulous?
Will you take up playing Scrabble on Facebook? Will you find solace in other word games? What features will drag you in?
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Bloggers have shown Scrabulous quite a bit of love. Will they continue to do the same with Scrabble? Or will they put down some harsh words?
Here’s five more things being in the Navy taught that apply to social networking …
Show Respect - show respect to those both senior to you and newer. These folks are all along for the ride like you are. They may be your partner sooner than you think, so treat them like they are now.
Always Be Polished - keep your best foot forward. This goes for your blog, your emails, and your social networking posts. It helps people respect and notice you. You’re easier to spot in the crowd.
Do Follow Up Work - If someone offers for you to contact them, do it. Follow up with people in a timely and organized manner. It shows that you care. Also, if you make a commitment, keep it. If you have an issue keeping plans, let the other parties involved know immediately.
Do Your Homework - no one wants to hear it but most of success is preparation. Plan for important events and meetings before they happen. Be prepared to execute and discuss ideas. Be ready for your time to shine.
Be Ready - This is more than studying up on the latest gadgets and geekery. It’s about being ready to work. Be ready to bend an elbow for others when it’s their time. Coming along side others and how you do it says more about who you are than what you talk about on a hundred social networks.
Yes these seem obvious, but I’d be unable to count how often these things are violated or misrepresented by those purporting to be social media and networking experts. There isn’t a one of these that each of us who blog, network and write couldn’t improve on.
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Amazon is my favorite place to shop. Yes I live in St. Charles county, but Wal-mart really isn’t where I spend all the big bucks. As you might have guessed that’s where I purchase all my books.
Purchasing leads to recommendations, and recommendations pointed to Dean Koontz. So I picked up the first Odd Thomas novel. I was immediately hooked. So far I’ve read the first three.
Koontz purchases on Amazon of course led to more of his works turning up for me to buy. Oh, the titles are interesting, but they don’t really say much about the books. Let’s list a few…
Seize the Night
The Watchers
Life Expectancy
Intensity
Phantoms
You get the drift. Short titles and cool covers. That’s what it’s all about I guess. What I’d really like though is my friends and contacts to make some recommendations about his books. Or heck, just suggest some good alternates.
Ones I’ve read already:
Odd Thomas 1st-3rd books
Frankenstein books - Prodigal Son and City of Night
That’s it. Just those. I’ve been wary of running out and spending $10 on something I might hate. Are the Odd Thomas novels a good indication of the rest of his writing? Are they exceptions?
So I’m asking you, my readers, and the rest of you out there on the net; what’s your favorite Koontz tale or alternate work of fiction.
I’ll post the results here on the blog, so keep the suggestions coming in. As an added incentive, I’ll buy you a book too if I take your suggestion. So be the first to suggest your favorite.
Alltop much? If you want to know what’s hot, or at least the top 100 in something, there’s no better way than to visit alltop.com. Today is the premiere of utterati.alltop.com. It’s the site for the top Utterz users on the net.
Notice anything? Yep, yours truly made the page. My name is up there along with such greats as Chris Brogan, Andy Caster, and Paisano. Woot.
Do stop by the Utterati page and check out some of the goodness. You won’t be sorry.
