"This is a huge win for music site iLike - U2’s Bono recorded an interview with the iLike founders talking about the history of a new song called Wave of Sorrow. The song, which is being released on Tuesday next week as part of the remastered Joshua Tree album and DVD, was written in the 80’s but never recorded.

It’s available in two places - on iLike and on iLike’s Facebook application. The Facebook application is particularly interesting - 1.2 million fans have signed up specifically to get new U2 news and were notified as soon as the video went up two days ago. So far, over 9,000 fan messages have been left on the video.

This was an experiment, says a representative of the company. No press was notified when the video went live - they wanted to see how fast it spread virally and without any promotion.

This wasn’t out of the blue - iLike has connections to U2 through Elevation Partners (Mark Bodnick at Elevation is on the board of iLike, and Bono is also a partner at Elevation), and Brooke Hammerling, who handles PR for iLike, is a personal friend of Bono’s.

But regardless of the connections, the success of the viral release will certainly get other artists to consider using iLike to talk directly to fans via the Facebook application. That’s something MySpace and other competitors can’t do yet."

Cool.