Last week I put up an article about ways to get your brand into user generated content and social networking websites in which I mentioned that if you aren’t willing to move fast, you shouldn’t move at all. This morning’s release by EA of a Scrabble Game on FaceBook serves as a great example of just why you have to be ready, willing and able to move quicker than quick to play in the current market.

So EA released scrabble, what’s the big deal? The deal is there’s been a scrabble “knock off” (Scrabulous) for over a year on Facebook with more than 450,000 daily users (putting it in the top 10 apps on FaceBook). Now the official version could potentially have a better feature set, interface or just plain work better but Scrabulous is a huge success and knocking it off it’s block would be just about impossible short of getting it legally removed (which has a whole set of brand implications). EA may very well see traction and pick up with its game, but let’s be honest, when something has over 10% of a network using it daily EA would have to have something many times better to get even a moderate drop off from one to the other.

On the flip side, had EA, Hasbro games or anyone else involved in the official scrabble game made a move earlier to develop their own game or strike up a partnership/ buyout of Scrabulous, all bets would have been off. Suing an app into oblivion can certainly get the dice reset but at what cost to the brand and it’s long term reputation?

However, while this topic has been covered six ways to sunday with just about the same analysis everywhere, I do see a potential move for EA here — get their app working really, really well in the mobile world. We’ve got the iphone, the iphone knock offs, smart phones and later this week (can’t wait) the new iphone. There’s a big door opening to getting more games working on mobile devices so if EA can spin out that way they still won’t get huge numbers immediately and are unlikely to ever unseat Scrabulous but for the networks with strong mobile adoption, it’s a pretty compeling arguement to be able to post & play from anywhere your phone works. Having a better offering almost always gives you a play, how big of one, well… let’s just say the real moral of the story here is to move fast or pay the price, and I don’t see any technology, branding or advertising changing that.

That all said, whose up for a game (with either app).