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An interesting northwest start up called Toonlet makes a fun set of online tools to rapidly create web comics. It gives you a lot of templates to start with, so that you can create mostly human (and alien) characters for your comics, add moods and the like. These types of characters aren’t the Batman/Superman type – more along the lines of what you see in the newspaper. You can also auto-generate character and then customize them.

The interface for building characters and comic strips is a very clever, easy to use set of tools that uses Flash – Flash without the pain of having to use Flash the product (vs Flash the player). It lets you resize, flip and make other transformations to your characters.

Toonlet is a lot of fun, and it has tools for sharing your creations with others – on your own website, through feeds and the like.

After reading a great article in Practical Web Design on FaceBook integration, we set up both the Runtime Revolution Facebook Group and Valentina Facebook Group on…Facebook. Tom McGrath of Lazy River Software asked me earlier today why you’d want to spread yourself so thin across multiple venues. There are plenty of social implications – its extremely hard to keep up with all of these social networking venues. They all want to own our identity and content – and they all (the ones that will survive) offer integration APIs, videos, music and more to get you to participate.

But this really isn’t about the technology – its about the socializing and appropriate venue. It seems like that simple truth may be eluding many, who probably have already forgotten what drew them to pre-Web 2.0 venues that very much were about where you hung out. The more you can get your face out there in the right venue, the more likely you will meet others of that also like that venue.