brad garland

For those of you that haven’t heard of Virb it is best described as a MySpace-like site that doesn’t suck on style or design.

I originally saw Ryan Sims designing some of its pages while at the Future of Web Apps conference in San Francisco but never asked him about it and never could get in for the beta. Its currently still in private beta and I just happened across an invite via the generosity of Shawn Grimes.

I had the chance to get in there and play around with the majority of it. Here’s my profile. It has all the same things as MySpace such as sections for your interests, favorite movies, activities, yada yada yada. It will allow you to do blog posts to it (which I don’t like to do). I have always preferred how Facebook has gone about doing it and it imports my blog posts from here to there without me needing to do anything after intial setup. Brillant.

Anyway, I believe a big part of Virb’s planned success is the allow users to easily customize their profile. There is an area that you can, in real-time, update your colors, fonts, and such. Very nice interface and it even gives you the nice color palette to chose from so you don’t need to know the hex code for the colors you want.

There’s not much yet that makes Virb stand out, in my opinion. They are not doing much different from anybody else but like I said before, private beta, it might still be to early to officially judge.

If you guys would like to play around a bit, I currently have 15 free invites that I’d love to give away. Just comment on this post, with a legitimate email address, and I’ll send it over as soon as I get it. And once you’re signed up, don’t forget to add me as a friend.

UPDATE: Since this review I haven’t really spent much time with Virb. They have added some new features but since I already have established profiles on other sites this one isn’t getting used. It’s a great looking site but IMO, it doesn’t really stand out as the ‘go-to’ social networking or even music-centric social site.

[tags]Virb, Myspace, Facebook, social networking, shawn grimes, brad garland[/tags]