T-Mobile Takes Angry Birds Offline, Expands Its Size By 1000

T-Mobile makes another cultural coup with its ongoing and highly social "Life is for sharing" campaign. On May 11 in Barcelona, the firm set up a huge live Angry Birds installment inviting people to play.

A few curious stragglers were drawn to a booth, where they found a smartphone with Angry Birds loaded. They'd casually draw the slingshot back (the birth of an addiction) -- and find to their surprise that the result was replicated in real life. It goes without saying that a crowd formed fast.

It's been cool watching this campaign mature with time, because it's a real study in how T-Mobile has snapped up cultural passions and tried to leverage them in real-life while scaling the experience as much as possible. These deeply personal offline moments, sometimes hit-or-miss but often poignant, are also making great online video fodder.

To send you off nice, some YouTube comment candy:

"Angry birds will now be used in real life as America's first line of defense in war."

That's probably not far off the mark.