Once upon a time it was slashdot that could bring fledgling websites and internet services to their needs by triggering an unexpected surge in interest.  These days it’s the high-profile twitterati that can overload a server in hours.  A couple of days ago this is exactly what happened to new music service mflow thanks to Stephen Fry.

If you haven’t come across mflow yet, it has been described as a cross between Twitter and Spotify but personally I think it’s a lot closer to a cross between Twitter and Last.fm.  It’s not about to become your main music application (unless you like the unpredictability of not knowing what you’ll be listening to next), but for discovering new music it’s a great service.

Like Twitter you follow other users and gain followers, you can flow music to your followers at which point they’ll have a full length preview of your flows dropped into their inboxes.  Should any of your followers like the music you’re flowing enough to buy the (DRM free) mp3’s you’ll get a 20% cut added to your account.  Okay you’re not going to get rich anytime soon at a rate of 16p per track (or £1.79 per album) but it can cover the cost of some free mp3’s for you and all for just sharing great music.

Mflow has been growing steadily since it’s official launch in April, all was going well, service was good then Stephen Fry mentioned it…

As expected, his loyal followers jumped on it, swamping mflow’s servers with requests and bringing the service to a crawl.  There hasn’t been any official word on the size of the increase except to say “The traffic has been off the scale“.  As promised the service was bounced and tweaked and has come back able to cope with the increase in demand.  Sadly at the time of writing we’re still waiting to see what Stephen Fry is going to flow, could he be that he hasn’t found anything he likes yet or is he wary of revealing his taste in music.

I myself have no such problems, my taste in music is as random as ever but there are some great bands on there so if you fancy hearing something different, drop by, install mflow and spread the love for your favourite tunes.