Review: Virb - Advanced Social Networking

There’s been a lot of talk around the new social networking service Virb.com lately, and for good reason. Virb.com is much more than MySpace ever was, or ever could hope to be. Virb breaks through the constraints of social networking and brings everything (music, movies, photos, blogging, and design) together in an easy to use package.

Virb is a new, but long awaited product from Unborn Media, the people behind popular music networking service PureVolume. While they’re not really known as social networking giants like MySpace, they are known for their beautiful designs and the amazing features that come with them, thanks in part to the Neubix team. While Virb is overall an amazing feat both from a UI Design perspective and from a basic user experience perspective, there are a few features that really stand out to me.

Virb Music / VirbTunes

As far as music goes, Virb is definitely on the top of my list for networking services. While Unborn hasn’t fully linked Purevolume with Virb, a feature many expect to see, they have borrowed the popular PV Music Player for Band Pages, allowing users to add songs and even create their own playlists. Above I’d compiled a simple playlist of my favorite music, easily organizable with a drag and drop interface. The first three songs on your playlist are automatically displayed on your profile, something MySpace has failed to incorporate, even years after its inception.

Another nifty music feature is VirbTunes, an Audioscrobbler like iTunes plugin that pulls information like your most frequently played songs, artists, and more, and displays that information on your Virb profile for everyone to see. But what if you don’t want this to be shown? Well, Virb makes it easy to redesign and reorganize your profile, so that’s no problem at all.

Virb Design Builder

For those of you familiar with the MySpace setup, you know how difficult it is to edit the look of your already unnatractive profile. You’re forced to copy and paste jarbled CSS into sections you’ve never even heard of, bringing your profile to a browser-crashing, unreadable low. Fortunately for the Virb users, Unborn has integrated a profile editor that’s both attractive and easy to use.

The editor makes use of the ColourMod application for color selection, and that’s pretty much it. It’s as easy as that. Choose your colors, and maybe change your fonts around, and the live preview window will show you exactly what’s been changed. This is probably my favorite feature of all, and I know it will save a lot of the non design savvy users a ton of time.

The Virb Dashboard / Your Home

Again, MySpace has been beaten when it comes to good design. The MySpace dashboard is bloated and covered with ads, forcing you to scroll down just to see if you have new messages or comments. In Virb’s case, everything is presented towards the top of the page with virtually no need for scrolling. Recent updates fromy our friends are displayed in a neat box with some nice AJAX hover effects, with Announcements, the equivalent of bulletins, displayed below that. The difference, you can now leave comments on bulletins.

To the left of that is your basic information box, informing you of new messages, comments, or friend requests, with a small amount of unobtrusive AdSense Ads below that, and finally your profile stats appear below that. Everything is, once again, easy on the eyes.

Now, as a final note, Virb is still in Beta mode, so things may load slow, or not work at all. I was also planning on covering the excellent photo organizing features, but time has not permitted me to do so. Either way, enjoy and make sure to check out Virb as soon as you can.