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After social news site Reddit went open-source in June, this was a logical next step: letting members take the code and import it to their own sites, creating social-news hubs of their own. That’s the company’s latest announcement, per a blog post on Tuesday.

“Today is the day Reddit fully becomes a platform for building link sharing sites,” a post on the company blog explained. Technically, developers could already do this. But now the site is making it easier for them to do so, and letting them customize the design of the voting system to fit their own sites; more importantly, they can import them off the Reddit domain.

Reddit Bacon.

The site’s humor-inclined team referred to the site update as “somewhere between when a caterpillar becomes a butterfly and when six hydrogen nuclei combine to form helium and (eventually) life as we know it.” More likely, it’ll make the news-voting system proliferate on sites that wouldn’t otherwise have it; Reddit’s team brought up the example of an entire Reddit voting system devoted to people who love bacon, for example.

Though Reddit, which was acquired by Conde Nast’s Wired Digital division in 2006, is much smaller than rival Digg and the fast-growing Yahoo Buzz, this could make some waves. Plenty of sites have tried to build third-party social news systems in-house, and Reddit’s open-source alternative could make it easier to integrate this sort of thing.

Plus, the company is hosting a contest to see who can create the best “custom Reddit” from scratch (i.e. fewer than 250 subscribers) in a month. The winner gets a MacBook Air laptop, a $1500 Apple gift card, and a bucketload of free Reddit gear. Go, bacon guys, go!

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Reddit now lets you create your own social news site

There’s no more Scrabulous on Facebook. For real. Unless you’re in India.

According to the Associated Press, the social network has officially disabled access to the popular online game, which closely resembles classic board game Scrabble, after a complaint from Mattel, the company that publishes it outside the U.S. and Canada. Access within the U.S. and Canada had already been blocked.

The rights to Scrabble are owned by different companies: Hasbro handles the game the U.S. and Canada, and Mattel internationally. The two takedowns were likewise different: The creators of Scrabulous disabled U.S. and Canadian access on their own after receiving a takedown notice from Hasbro, but the AP article says that Mattel’s complaint led Facebook to take action.

Mattel has filed a lawsuit in India, where the developers who created the game are based, over copyright and trademark infringement. A court decision is pending, which is why Scrabulous is still accessible in India while Facebook chose to pull it elsewhere.

Outside of Facebook, the Web site Scrabulous.com is still extant.

The creators of Scrabulous, brothers Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, are none too pleased with Facebook’s intervention. “It surprises us that Mattel chose to direct Facebook to take down Scrabulous without waiting for the (Indian court’s) decision,” Jayant Agarwalla said in a statement to the AP. “Mattel’s action speaks volumes about their business practices and respect for the judiciary.”

The brothers subsequently modified Scrabulous‘ design and points system, and relaunched it as Wordscraper in the U.S. and Canada within days of its initial demise. Mattel and Hasbro, meanwhile, have both created official versions of Scrabble on the platform.

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Another nail in the ‘Scrabulous’ coffin

The biggest social networks, like Facebook and MySpace, have operated mobile sites since long before anyone had seen an iPhone. Medium-sized ones are still warming up to it: Hi5, a San Francisco-based company that counts its biggest following in Latin America, formally launched Hi5 Mobile on Tuesday.

The social site has launched its mobile edition in 26 different languages, a testament to its multicultural image, and has optimized it for the iPhone, BlackBerry, and select handsets from manufacturers like Nokia and Samsung. Those translations, Hi5 says, are done on the part of locals rather than the company to make the site more “culturally relevant.”

But more importantly, Hi5’s mobile site is a marketing effort to reach its most loyal customers. MySpace and Facebook’s current mobile sites are intended as supplements to the browser-based editions, but Hi5 openly targets “the millions of international users who primarily use mobile devices, instead of a personal computer, to stay connected with friends, family and colleagues.” After all, access to PCs is less common in many Latin American countries than it is in Hi5’s home country.

Recent statistics from ComScore indicate that Hi5 has doubled its visitor count over the past year and that much of its foothold is in Latin American countries; the social-networking industry in that region of the world has grown by a third since mid-2007 according to the same statistics.

While other social networks like MySpace are working hard to make headway in the Latin American market (and MySpace says its market share there is growing) launching a mobile site is a savvy move on Hi5’s part.

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Hi5 goes mobile: It’s a bigger deal than you think

In talking to Mark Law, the new VP of product development for AOL’s MapQuest, I was surprised to learn how powerful the service still is. To my mind the formerly leading mapping system is a trailing contender against Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Ask.com, but apparently MapQuest is still in the game as a leading Web site, with 48 million monthly visitors to the site, not to mention the users of the service who see it embedded on partner sites.

The new MapQuest puts a map on the destination page, as well as a better address entry box.

Law walked me through updates to the service that will be rolling out as an optional beta test to the site’s users on Tuesday. In a nutshell, the changes are evolutionary and to my mind required if the app to stay relevant. But the MapQuest team has to be careful with its updates, since so many general users of the service are accustomed to its somewhat old-fashioned interface and market-trailing features. Of his users, Law says simply, “They don’t want to see a lot of change.”

The service is still moving forward, just not at the blistering Web 2.0 pace of the other start-ups we cover here. The biggest change, according to Law, is this: “The major thing we’re doing is actually adding a map. A novel concept, but we’re putting it on the home page.”

So when you go to MapQuest.com, instead of just seeing an address entry box, now you’ll see an actual map on the start page. You know, like on every other mapping site. But this is a necessary change for the service, so let’s give the team credit for the update.

Also in the no-longer-new-for-2008 category: The service now makes it easy for you to recall your recently-used destinations and routes. And it can send directions to e-mail and to mobiles, via SMS.

Other improvements in the user interface include and entry box that does a better job of letting the user enter just a single address to map, or a start and end point to create a route. The system can now also parse long address strings instead of requiring the user to enter in address, city, and ZIP code separately.

I’m more impressed by the new location-based content getting layered into the service, such as weather, traffic incident reports, and gas prices. All these relevant data chunks pop up over the MapQuest maps, where they are actually useful. “We’re transforming from just a maps utility to giving you what’s around you,” Law said.

Data blocks on items like gas prices and traffic now pop up over the map when you need them.

While the mobile “Navigator” version of the service ($49 a year) will give you walking directions in addition to the driving directions that are standard on the Web version, I was surprised that there’s no public transit routing available yet. (To be fair, though, Google Maps on the iPhone doesn’t offer either walking or transit directions.) Law said that, “We are evaluating what users are asking us for,” but that some features–like transit–are difficult to launch while maintaining MapQuest’s consistent quality across the country. “People trust us for our accuracy,” he said. A quick survey at the CNET office reinforced this: Users here feel MapQuest is more reliable than Google, but Google is a lot easier and faster to work with.

As far as other, more Web 2.0 features, like support for community-edited maps, 3D views, street-level photography and the like, the advice I have for MapQuest fans is to not hold your breath. This service is squarely aimed at mainstream users and its 1,100 business partners (Law twice mentioned Dunkin Donuts as a user of the API).

I’m trying to find a positive lesson in MapQuest’s story, but to be honest it’s a reach. I can understand a company’s goal to iterate its interface and features at a measured pace, to not alienate a large and profitable user base. But old-fashioned is rarely a winning characteristic of a Web business. In MapQuest’s case I can’t help but wonder where the company would be if it had been more aggressive in adopting new technology and distribution methods, as Microsoft and Google did in the vacuum it left. I’ll take Law at his word that MapQuest is big. But it could have been much bigger.

MapQuest inches toward modernity

Look out multinational employers, Glassdoor.com is also going multinational.

Glassdoor, a site that gives insider reports on salaries and the zeitgeists of more than 11,000 companies, plans to announce Tuesday that has added multi-currency information for more than 100 countries. Basically, that means a Google employee in the search company’s terribly cool offices in Zurich, Switzerland, can see salaries in the local Swiss franc–probably more useful than seeing it in the American dollar.

Launched in June, Glassdoor says it has received more than 60,000 salary reports and company reviews. It was founded by veterans of Microsoft and Expedia (Rich Barton, the CEO of real estate site Zillow, is non-executive chairman). The idea was to make salary and workplace-quality information as public as possible. The service is free, but in order to get information, users have to provide information.

Glassdoor has added two other features: The first allows users to more finely filter the information they’re looking for. The second is an “employer” feature that allows a representative for one of the many companies being reviewed to have the ability to comment on reviews (fair’s fair, after all) and talk with Glassdoor employees to make sure their information is accurate.

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Glassdoor offering a look at salaries beyond the dollar