Mark Zuckerberg’s appearance on 60 Minutes Sunday featured a moment where he showed Leslie Stahl Scrabulous, an app for Facebook that allows members to play Scrabble with each other. Zuckerberg was playing against his grandparents.

Not for long, apparently. Lawyers for Hasbro and Mattel are asking Facebook to remove the app because it violates their copyright on Scrabble.

Scrabulous, which was created by Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla from Kolkata, India, boasts nearly 600,000 daily users and is one of the top ten apps on Facebook. The popularity has spawned several cheating sites that will take your letters and come up with a lucrative word for you.

The threat has led to the creation of a new Facebook group called “Save Scrabulous.” 600 members have already signed up for it.

I’m not sure if the feature on 60 Minutes had anything to do with Mattel and Hasbro going after the app. It may not have since it was the lowest rated 60 Minutes of the season.

Zuckerberg’s form on the interview was mixed. On one hand, he seemed like a hard-working code geek who still works out in the open at Facebook headquarters, entering code like everybody else. He also mentioned that he lives in a one-room apartment and sleeps on a mattress on the floor.

But at other moments, he looked as though he was not quite ready for prime time. One gets the feeling Zuckerberg would be better served to have somebody more experienced become the face of his organization. When asked about Facebook’s contraversial advertising techniques, he mentioned something about having to find a way to pay his 400 workers. Technically true, but “we do it to pay the bills” doesn’t exactly sound like a professional way of expressing the social media marketing possibilities of his network.

Still, Facebook continues to explode in growth and as more people use Facebook as their portal to the web, marketing strategies on the site will become more important.

Zuckerberg also mentioned that he does not expect Facebook to go public this year.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 16th, 2008 at 12:11 pmand is filed under Business, Social Media. 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.