Facebook is music to some users' ears

A cheery new YouTube video called "Facebook - The Musical" is on its way to going viral at more than 500,000 views during its first few days on the Web, thanks to a campy crew of crooners singing the praises of the social network.

[ BLOCK YOUR EARS:BlackBerry band sings praises of Z10]

While I'd love to see "Annie," "Bye Bye Birdie" and the rest of those overplayed musicals go the way of MySpace (oh, it's still around?), it looks like tech-themed musicals might be here to stay. At least on YouTube.

AVbyte, the outfit that produced "Facebook - The Musical" (what it calls a Youtubesical), has also created musicals honoring Instagram, and in conjunction with the Vlogbrothers, Tumblr (in which a Disney-ish Ariel and geeky friends sing about the joys of viewing Tumblrs instead of actually reading).

AVbyte on Friday even uploaded a follow-on to its "Facebook - The Musical" that highlights comments from viewers of the original video, including a request to come up with a Twitter musical (the AVbyte guys just laugh at the notion of putting Google+ to music, dismissing it as something they tried for a day).

But on the Twitter front, have no fear: A musical featuring a lot of tweets and paper clips popped up on YouTube a few years back (and mercifully, has been viewed by fewer than 3,000).

And as for the giant search engine that does no evil, well, a live action version of "Google: The Musical" had a run at the University of Minnesota back in 2006. ("Google is taking over the world - one thought at a time. An entirely original darkly-comedic electronic musical. Librarians, DJs and zombies - it's a brave new world.") If it went on to Broadway, we missed it.

Naturally, the other prime subject for a musical -- Apple -- has also been addressed. A crowdsourced Indiegogo project to convert the play "The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs" into a musical has raised the $3,100 needed by Fractured Atlas to put the show on this summer at the Capital Fringe Festival in Washington.

And don't confuse that production with "Nerds," a musical comedy from North Carolina Theatre featuring performers portraying both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.

There might not be a Tony Award coming for any of the above, but perhaps they are a step forward from even older attempts at converting tech subjects into musicals. We leave you with: "IBM 1401: A User's Manual," from Iceland:

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This story, "Facebook is music to some users' ears" was originally published by Network World.