This morning I received an invitation to join virb, a new online community. It appears as though they’re gunning after the 8 million pound gorilla that is MySpace, which they must know is a gargantuan feat. That said, virb is a hell of a lot of fun to play around with.
It appears to be built on Rails (which I’ve been having a lot of fun with lately) and allows for adding music, photos, videos, blog posts and the like. It seems as though they’ve gone to a lot of trouble developing an interface that is easy to use, and the final product is very pretty.
The music player is fantastic - you can store your playlist, get recommendations from others, etc. The player is brilliantly simple to use. You can even plug virb into itunes and access your music from there. The artists putting music up there are really good too.
They’ve made it easy to customize your page as well - instead of resorting to hacks like div overlays and the like, they’ve baked massive customization right in. I’m sure myspace hacks will run in and ugly the place up in time, but there are some really pretty pages are already up there. Hopefully when it launches folks will look to them for inspiration vs. the monstrosities they’re used to.
I have no idea whether this thing can take off (maybe they don’t care about toppling MySpace - what’s wrong with carving out your own niche on the net and being happy with it?) but I wish them well. It’s very well thought-out, and the dozens of other social networking sites out there could learn a thing or two from these guys.
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