The Flood Goes Web 2.0 Crazy

Hey, The 1937 Flood can be as Web 2.0 cyber savant-ish as the next guy. Lately, in fact, the Original Old Boy Band has been expanding its online footprint into the new world of social networking, opening Flood-happy outposts on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and last.fm.

Here's a roundup of our social network connections and the links that will take you to them.

-- Facebook is a primary social utility that connects people with friends and others who work, study and live around them. On Facebook, floodsters Pamela and Charlie Bowen, David and Susie Peyton, and Michelle Walker all have already created their own individual pages. And now to the Flood itself has set up a public Facebook page. Click here to reach it. If you too already have a Facebook account, we urge you to drop in at our public page and sign up as a Flood fan. (We're trying to jazz the numbers.) If you're not Facebook-friendly yet, hey, consider joining -- it's free and it's fun.

-- last.fm is perhaps our favorite Web 2.0 network, because it is all about music and musicians. The Flood uses last.fm to provide full-length samples of tracks and to run the popular Flood Radio feature, which we wrote about in an earlier blog. To reach us on last.fm, click here. You'll find that we also use last.fm as a major distributor of our weekly Digital Jam Session files, in addition to podcasting them, as we've reported earlier.

-- MySpace is one the of the oldest social networking site, offering email, a forum and communities. We're here on MySpace. Now, we're just getting started on this service and, honestly, from what we've seen so far, it doesn't seem as powerful or as interesting as Facebook. However, we're open to persuasion. If you're a MySpace mavin and think we're missing the point, feel free to enlighten us about what we're not seeing in this obviously popular network.

-- Twitter is a free social messaging utility for staying connected by using "mini-blogs" (messages limited to several hundred characters) in real time. To twitter and follow the Flood, click here. Well, like MySpace, Twitter is one of those services whose value seems to elude us. We're guessing we're missing something big here, because twittering has become an obsession with so many folks. OK, so here's the deal: if a lot of people sign up to twit about, oh, when The Flood is stuck in traffic, what the guys are having for lunch and who's having what operation when, we'll start using Twitter religiously. We're like that. And seriously, twitting does seem like it would be useful to report whether the weekly jam session is on schedule, when a gig is coming up and so on. As we say, we can be persuaded.

So, there you have it. Let us know what you think about any of these new net connections. And if you have suggestions for others we might explore, just sing out!