Last weekend my email was inundated with requests from people wanting me to join Snapvine, a site I was not aware of until the first of the invitations arrived.
Strangely, I did recognise one of the emailers as a person from Dunedin I had ``met'' online when I was researching a column about online gaming.
The person from Ocean View was a dedicated online euchre player who tried to interest me in joining his group of friends around the world who delighted in playing cards online.
Not being a card player of any note, I was more interested in chatting to him about why he enjoyed what he did. He preferred to use a headset, so we did really chat rather than type in IM style.
What I had found interesting was that he had used Google Maps to pinpoint his home to the wider world, right down to the address.
Back to Snapvine and the request I received from E-Kiwi to join the social networking site.
Because I knew E-Kiwi was in Dunedin, I joined but carefully used my Yahoo! email address. I filled in a profile and was urged to leave a voice message. I was automatically added to E-Kiwi's group of friends.
He then left a message saying he did not recognise me and could I tell him a bit about myself. So I did. Then I got online and found he had logged so I buzzed him, explained who I was and when we had met. The clouds slowly cleared but he could not chat because he was playing Scrabble.
Gone, it seemed, was euchre, to be replaced by Scrabulous, a virtual knock-off of the Scrabble board game with more than 700,000 players a day and nearly three million registered users.
Fans of the game are obsessive. They play against friends, co-workers, family members and strangers. Many have several games going at once.
In the interests of research I polled some other contacts from the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom. A simple email question about whether they had heard of, or played online Scrabble. I was blown away by reaction. Of 20 emails, 16 had heard of Scrabulous and 14 played regularly.
I enjoyed playing Scrabble as a youngster so thought I might enjoy it online. No, not my thing. Sitting alone playing a ``board game'' online with someone I did not know or could chat to in real time is not for me.
Neither is it the thing of the companies that own the rights to Scrabble: Hasbro, which sells it in North America, and Mattel, which markets it everywhere else.
In January, they denounced Scrabulous as piracy and threatened legal action against its creators, two brothers in Calcutta named Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla who run a software development company.
Jayant Agarwalla (21) said he and his brother did not create Scrabulous to make money, even though they now collected $US25,000 a month from online advertising. They just wanted to play Scrabble on their computers and their favourite (unauthorised) site had started charging.
Scrabulous, which most users play on the Facebook social-networking site, has a board that looks just like Scrabble with the same number of letter tiles with the same point values. Players can send invitations to others on Facebook or search for strangers to play with by posting messages.
There is no time limit for moves or games. Scrabulous keeps track of player statistics and it does not allow fake words. It cannot prevent players from cheating through the unaffiliated online ``helper'' which generates a list of possible words based on the letters a user has.
Two game companies say they have signed deals with Hasbro to create online versions of the company's games. But Scrabulous has already brought Scrabble a newly-found virtual popularity that none of the game companies could have anticipated.
I doubt I will be keeping up with Snapvine, but I might keep an eye on E-Kiwi as he explores the next online game craze.
