Scrabulous a popular addition on Facebook

Scrabble addict Rachel Zylstra is playing five games at once. For her move in one of them, she's just plunked down a seven-letter bingo, the word "SAINTED," for 74 points. The game is taking place over the Internet against her friend Gretchen. "She's a good friend," says Zylstra, a 27-year-old executive assistant in New York. "I know she can handle it."

In offices, college dorms and living rooms across the country, Scrabble fans are finding a new way to get their fix. It is Scrabulous, an online game that uses rules nearly identical to traditional Scrabble. In fact, there are enough similarities that some lawyers say that the creators of Scrabulous, a programming team of two brothers in Kolkata, India, may face possible copyright issues.

Scrabulous is spreading through an unusual route for a board game: Facebook, the social-networking site that started off connecting college kids and now has more than 45 million members of all ages.

Since its Facebook debut in July, Scrabulous has grown to about 950,000 players. According to Facebook's data, 36 percent of those players (about 342,000 people) are "daily active users," or people who have logged in every day over the last 30 days.

Those numbers reflect a critical decision by Jayant and Rajat Agarwalla, the brothers behind the game. Having drawn only a few thousand users to a Web site devoted to Scrabulous, they converted it to a Facebook "application" in June. An application is a module Facebook's users can add to their pages and then invite friends to join.

Scrabulous is not the first Web-based way for Scrabble fanatics to play online, but its popularity underscores the growing power of social-networking sites to offer businesses new sources of revenue and customers. Facebook says some 5,000 applications have been launched since May. Some developers are selling ads directly on their applications, while others are using the tools to promote products and services.

Other applications let members rate favorite beers, leave hand-drawn messages for friends and donate to charitable causes. The approach has drawn interest from big companies, including Microsoft and Amazon.com, which have already developed their own Facebook applications.

Scrabulous works very much like Scrabble, with users getting seven tiles at random and dragging letters onto a board to form words. Once a word is played, new tiles are automatically generated and opponents are notified that it's their turn.

There are crucial differences, though. For example, players can get away with looking up words before putting them down (a definite no-no in real Scrabble) and send trash-talking messages to opponents. A player can be engaged in a limitless number of games at once.

Players say these features are part of what makes the game so addictive. It's much easier to wow an opponent -- and score a lot of points -- by looking up a fancy word like "AZOTH," for example, than simply putting down "ZOO." Competition is further fueled by a page of "global stats," where top scorers and busy players are ranked.

Jey Cho, 25, wasn't a big Scrabble player, but Scrabulous has become a favorite pastime for the Los Angeles investment manager. He plays about four games simultaneously and checks his progress every few hours while at work. When he's at meetings, he often writes down random sets of letters to practice creating words, and he often disputes two-letter words over the phone with his favorite competitor, his girlfriend, in Boston.

Jayant Agarwalla says the idea for Scrabulous started out of desperation. For years, he played a free version of Scrabble with his father. But when the site began charging, his obsession became too expensive. So he did what any tech-savvy Scrabble addict would do: He built his own site.

After Facebook announced a call for applications, the Agarwallas moved the game there. Within a month, its user base swelled to more than 200,000, a surge that shut down Scrabulous for two days.

Rajat says that as of mid-September, the site's revenue from advertisements was sufficient to cover expenses. Now, the game brings in around $18,000 a month from advertising, says Jayant.

Legal experts say there are risks to Scrabulous, however. Copyright laws allow someone to freely use an idea, "but not copy the expression of the idea," says Anthony Falzone, head of the Fair Use Project at Stanford University. He says the Scrabulous board looks strikingly similar to the Scrabble board, with light blue and pink squares in the same spots denoting double- and triple-word scores. The names might also be too much alike, says John Palfrey, a Harvard law professor.

Hasbro Inc., which owns the U.S. rights for Scrabble, says it doesn't comment on legal matters. Rajat Agarwalla says he emailed Hasbro several weeks ago to notify the company about Scrabulous. Hasbro has not responded, he says. The brothers say they consider Scrabulous to be essentially an online version of Scrabble. "It's not really different," Jayant says.

For Nick George, the bigger issue is players getting outside help. The 46-year-old Tokyo-based multimedia producer is one of the game's top players, with more than 1,000 wins and fewer than 140 losses. He says he plays better online than off because there are no personalities involved: "It's not like playing a bad-tempered girlfriend."

Recently, George says, he's noticed a lot of the telltale signs of what, by Scrabble standards, would be considered cheating. Among them: long, obscure words that few people know.

Currently, the highest-scoring word listed in the global statistics page on Scrabulous is worth 1,778 points. The word, "OXYPHENBUTAZONE," well known among Scrabble aficonados as the ultimate point getter, was played by Sam Chenoweth. But the 27-year-old physics grad student in Melbourne, Australia, says he didn't do it while competing in a real game. Instead, he collaborated, in a series of moves, with a fellow master's student who was technically his opponent.

Ben Charlton runs an online feature where people can input a list of letters and find out possible word combinations. He says page views have increased 15-fold to 60,000 a day since July, shortly after Scrabulous launched. The name of his online feature: "Scrabble cheat-o-matic."