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).
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.
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.