The word “postmortem” assumes wry overtones when preceded by Scrabulous, the once-popular Scrabble clone on Facebook. The latter, as you’re all no doubt aware, is basically dead now — snuffed out by Facebook at the requests of Hasbro and Mattel. More than a few people have written about this, but I was looking for a thorough summary of the facts/issues and couldn’t find it, so I decided to write one of my own.

Shortly before Scrabulous was terminated, it had 500k active users a day according to TechCrunch. (I’ve seen other articles citing up to 700k daily actives at one point or another, but it seems that those numbers may have been temporary spikes associated with spikes in press coverage.) Interestingly, this suggests that Scrabulous’ growth was starting to fade, as the game already had 500k daily users back in December 2007. So, while it’s probably safe to assume that Scrabulous had more room to run, it’s optimistic (at best) to believe that the game was anywhere near the bottom or middle of its S curve. But this isn’t really the point I’m hoping to make; I just thought it worth noting that some of the Scrabulous hype (“they’re on the verge of 1m daily users!”) had gone a bit over-the-top.

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