Virb - Sexy Social Networks

Virb is a social networking site that has quietly been in private beta test for the last few months and has finally gone public.

They offer very much the standard ’social social networking’ features, blogs, tags, video embeds, photos, music, groups, RSS, etc.

So what makes them stand out and unique in the current mass of social networking sites that seem to be being released a dozen a day.

Virb is sexy. You could say it’s well designed, clean, sleek, polished, modern, stylish, etc, but to me all of those add up to a pretty sexy looking site.

But sexy probably isn’t enough these days, so Virb is not only sexy, but customizably sexy, you can login and tweak the look, feel, layout, colors, order, priority, etc of your pages so they truly reflect you.

Customization is one of the reasons that MySpace was so successful, it is also the reason that 90% of myspace pages are total train wrecks when it comes to style. Plain and simple Myspace’s openness to users stylistic choices are the reason it generates such ugly pages. Virb solves the issue, by allowing you to customize ‘within’ their framework, they still have control over how it looks and feels, you just get almost infinite combinations of a defined set of options.

It’s like buying a Ferrari. You can pick the paint, the interior, what car options are included, but at the end of the day Pininfarina’s design will still mean you get a beautiful car.

The other thing that really impressed me and others with the Virb site, was that it’s finished. It was public launched in a state so far beyond the “beta release” that every new web2.0 release seems to do these days. This is a product that looks good, works well and has some real depth to it’s capabilities. There are still some elements to the site that were “under construction” but they struck me as subsets of the real offering and they didn’t take away from what I wanted it to do for me.

VirbTunes

A good example of the depth of the application is VirbTunes. VirbTunes is an iTunes plugin that links your iTunes to your Virb account, allowing you to show your playlist, music stats, etc. As a further example of the degree of thought taken into this, if a tune is listed on your account for a band or musician with a Virb account, a relationship is generated automatically.

Extending my social network based on what I’m listening to is a great idea, for me creating a social network without needing the effort of meeting and greeting people is perfect, just show me all the people who have listened to both Haddaway’s ‘What is love’ and Freebird this morning and I’ll show you people I can really relate to.

Virb is the creation of Boston Based Unborn Media, who are also the brains behind Pure Volume, and neubix. They clearly have a very strong design team and a style they like and are refining (all 3 of those sites share the same feel).

Will it work?

Personally, this is one of the few true Social Network sites released in the last year that I actually think I might use, however I don’t think they will be the next big thing, I don’t think they’ll be the new MySpace. Why? Well because I’m not sure that good design is enough to pull people out of MySpace, the majority of MySpace users don’t seem to care about good design, or how their site looked. If they did they wouldn’t have tiled pictures of a dog wearing a bow tie across the background to their homepage, or added animated flame gifs that scroll across the screen under each block of content. I think virb will do well, I think they will capture a lot of the crowd that has already left MySpace, those nomadic few who wander looking for a new home. Virb will definitely take users from Vox and Trig.

Here’s a couple of Demo Page Layouts: