Facebook Live users cover Houston flooding!

Earlier this year, Facebook launched their "Live" functionality where celebrities and journalists could stream live, whatever and whenever they wanted, from their mobile phone. Earlier this month, they launched the Facebook Live Map, which allows desktop computer users to browse a worldwide map of all public Facebook Live streams.

This morning, I found at least 20 different people broadcasting live scenes from the Houston Flooding -- most speaking English, but some speaking Spanish as well. Here's an example of what it looked like at 10 a.m.:

One, shown below, was from Charlie Diggs, who was filming the rescue of people and animals from a police boat in Cypress, Texas, to the northwest of Houston. It had 200 viewers, but I shared it on AccuWeather.com and it went up to 3,000 concurrent before the connection was lost. He was broadcasting for about 30 minutes. It has now been viewed over 25,000 times!

The location of Cypress is shown on the radar estimate of precipitation map below -- and that's underestimating; one rain gauge in the area reported 17 inches since last night!

A year ago, there was no easy way to live stream live flooding rescues. There have been competitors, but none that can reach the masses like Facebook. People can (and do) even stream when the power's out. This technology is crucial to weather disasters because it gets multimedia reporting out from areas that would normally be cut off from the world. Ten years ago, we couldn't have dreamed of this. Welcome to the future.

I also did a Facebook Live as soon as I got into work this morning, but rather than showing my face for radio, I stepped through some maps and info about the flooding. Some people went live throughout the day, like W Dani Perez. Here's a sampling of some of the other Facebook Lives I clicked on today showing the flooding in Texas (NOTE: Since I didn't watch all of them all the way through, I cannot assume responsibility for anything you might hear or see on these links).

Amilcarm82 | tressanders3 | KATRACHO7 | maine.arvie.7 | walternawfside | Jerseydeejaygio | marcuserasmo | rvargas3 | jeffrey.mccord.90 | jimmy.vance.50 | pchears | sheferson.sierra | viviflorfragante | djpox.pepox | marc.alaniz.7 | ventura.benitez3 | neneyrodrigo | theoriginaltemper | darwin.flores.35 | ted.friedman.52 | RonnieDChapman