Ludwig @ February 2, 2007 Well I have been virb‘d, thanks to RED66 blog.
I was mostly excited about virb because it was like Gmail used to be at the start. Exclusive. You needed to be invited to get in. And I badly wanted to get in. Really bad. I was jitterry when I saw the GTalk message pop-up saying I received an invite.
I quickly accepted it, then sent Erica and Zak an invite.
Customising
Editing your look can be simple. Or easy.
Either you use a ’styler’ to select colors (from a color range ,similar to that in Photoshop), font families and font sizes for various elements. Or, you could go dive into the HTML and CSS of the page immediately under the advanced tab.
I felt kinda bad because at first I only edited my profile using the basic method by picking colours and default font families/sizes. Then I realised that the basic option was just a tool, to do most of the work for me.
What I loved, was the basic layout customisation. It’s a drag and drop of all the modules. You can drag them around to the change the order of modules in each column, and even to swap columns. Unfortuneately for now, you can only use one layout with the basic layout customisation tool, and that’s a two-column layout (wide on left|thin on right). This didn’t matter too much for me because it’s a good layout, and if you wanted to change this you could always delve into the advanced CSS and HTML.
I see expansion in terms of “layout” plugins in this section. The option to browse maybe a gallery of “layout”or upload a “layout” file yourself.
When I delved into the CSS and HTML I only had to change a few minor things, such as the H1 font, the position of some specific elements and the size of the ‘Group’ and ‘Friend’ images.
To preview your layout you click a “Preview” button which launches a new window/tab, depending on your default browser setting. In this new window is your page display with the HTML and CSS in the advanced customisation tool in the previous window. This isn’t a live preview yet, however there is a blue bar on the top of the preview reminding you it is a preview, as well as a “Refresh” button that refreshes the HTML and CSS used to render the preview.
Adding and Organising Photos
This is probably the first ’social-networking service’ or even ‘photo site’ (including flickr) that I would upload photos to regularly. Why? Because they make it simple, fun and pretty.
I can easily upload the photo, or many photos. Crop it (if I’m planning on using it for a display picture). Tag it (it even remembers previous tags I’ve used and suggests them as I type). And add a title and description.
I can add these photos to photo album by dragging them into the album.I can re-order the photos in the album by dragging them around. I can change the order of the photo albums by dragging it around. I can drag photos between albums. I can drag stuff, fromplaces to places. And it makes sense. It’s such an easy, simple and natural way of organising photos.
Friends
When you view someone’s profile you can click “Add as Friend” and write a personal message to go along with the request. Pretty standard. In fact, Friends work pretty much the same way (as far as I can tell) as they do in most other social networking sites - apart from the following:
- You can give each friend a nickname - that only you see.
- You tag friends with relationship information.
Apart from that you can make the friend not show up in your friends module on your profile, turn off announcements from that friend or remove them from the activity logs on your home page showing you what you’re friends have been doing(on virb.com ofcourse.)
Groups
You can join Groups. Don’t yet see the benefit but I’ve joined two so far; BarCampers and Twitterers.
Other stuff
Since virb.com is media orientated. You can upload your own music (your own, not music you own) and videos. And you can blog.
To have music (other than your own), for example from a band,in your music playlist - you need to go to their band page and select “Add” from their Music Player to add that song, to your playlist.
What else they can do…
I’d like to see three things from virb.
- They stay invite-only. This keeps the quality level high.
- They give me the option to add my blog feed (RSS) and then add the blog posts from this site, to the blogs module - instead of having to double post everything.
- They integrate ‘management’ into the profile view. When you view your profile and you see a photo description with a spelling mistake in it, you can’t click “Edit Photo” right there. You have to go to your “Home”, then to “Photos”, find the photo you want and then click to edit it.
Conclusion
Virb beats myspace. Hands down. Why? It’s simple, intuitive and fun to use. + it looks damn good.
Folks over at Unborn Media, if you want me to remove or unpublish this review until you go public (hopefully staying invite-only), then please contact me and I’ll do so ASAP.