About five days ago I was given an invite by a co-worker to a new social networking site called Virb. If I had one line to describe Virb to anyone else it would be this: Virb is MySpace’s hot sister who has a ton of experience and a ton of class.

Currently Virb is in beta mode, which means invite only. Which means it’s the “Who ya know” network. I really want Virb to succeed, so after my initial invite frenzy, I have slowed down a bit and will only give invites to those who really will use the service to pass along to others. People should not be on MySpace, they are trying to build a walled-garden and the whole site feels cheap. Virb is the designer’s MySpace.

Having already skinned my profile page, I have a few feelings on Virb, what’s hot and where they can improve. And let me say this, I really truly love it.

Aesthetics - Right off the bat, anyone who goes to Virb and logs in (assuming they have an account) will notice one strikingly different thing. Virb actually looks really really nice. It’s almost as if they hired a graphic designer versus a programmer to do the design and layout (no offense programmers I truly aspire to be like you). Things are easy to get to and it seems like each page you visit on the managing your profile end, was well thought out. Perhaps this isn’t a big game changer for all those MySpace folks out there, let’s face it, the majority of them have pages that make us designers not be able to sleep at night. But, it is a game changer for us designers, who influence a large part of the internet community, whether it be friends, family, or coworkers. And don’t think for a second we won’t take the time to make our virb profile pages look first rate.

Flexibility - In making our profiles look first rate, we need lots of css hooks built into the html we cannot touch and lot’s of flexibility with the structure of html in the layout. The good folks at Virb did both. Not only can you change any CSS within the body of your profile, you can also change the way the blocks on the page are laid out. In fact, I think it’s possible to make a profile page look anyway you would like WITHOUT hacking together a layout. Hopefully this is something the people who are really into changing their MySpace layouts will be attracted to (Does the Virb community even want that?). I really appreciate the extra things they have done to add to the flexibility of profile layouts.

While someone like myself likes to jump right into the code and get their hands dirty, some people aren’t this way. Fortunately Virb has built a drag and drop Ajax interface to change all of the content to be in either of the two columns. It’s the little things like this that make Virb so brilliant.

The Little Things - Have a flickr account? Want to put it on your Virb page? No problem. No more building stupid slideshows with five pictures. This is the beauty of Virb, they aren’t trying to be the end all be all for any kind of media hosting/uploading. They want to offer you the service, but give you choices. Want to show your Flickr pictures on the profile and not your Virb pictures, no problem. It seems like there is a community of users building hooks into all kinds of other media services as well.

Things I would like to see

1) More Modules - The more the merrier, I would like to see these develop like dashboard widgets where companies are releasing them in an environment friendly to developers. So the development of widgets is a cooperation between Virb and any other party, versus a competition. I am sure as the community grows, tons of people will get in on developing modules.
2) Skins - This is another thing I think will grow as more and more users hop over to Virb. It would be nice if we as developers could export a skin we build, and then other community members could upload and install the skin for their profile. This would get so much love from designers. *Hint Hint*
3) Version Control - Of all of my “feature requests” this one is the most important. I would love to see version controls for changing the appearance of a page. Because there is none, it’s really easy to make a change (read mistake) and save over your old version. Personally I do a fairly decent job of remembering the changes I make, but I am sure the majority of people hacking around in there are doing so based on trial and error. They will only get frusterated.

Conclusion

Virb rocks. There are so many great things about it. There are so many things that initial users log in and say oh wow. I think it’s the real winner of any new social network sites I have seen. MySpace is a sinking ship (imo) and It will be good to see what people will do with their Virb pages.

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