J David Macor

I recently got invited by my good friend Jeremy to join this new social network called Virb°. To describe it in a very basic way, it is kind of like Facebook mashed up with MySpace, with a web 2.0 flare. Oh and without all of the boring uniformity of Facebook and the incessant ugliness of MySpace. I am not affiliated with Virb° nor am I getting paid for this review; I have just been addicted to this thing for the past couple of days now, and I wanted to share what features I am really digging on.

Let’s start with the Frontpage. Its clean and subtle design is extremely appealing and inviting. You are not blasted with blinking promotions, and awkward color schemes. You will find some featured artists and what is really hot that moment on the site. Keep in mind that this homepage is quite separate from your personal admin page, but we will get to that in a moment. This page is a really good place to go when you are all bored and are looking for something browse worthy.

As for your personal start page, it has all of the features you would expect. This includes your messages, requests, friend updates; you know, the usual. This is the place where you do all your meta stuff, including personalization, making announcements, and even checking out some fairly detailed profile stats. Here’s what it looks like:

One of my favorite features is that the ads are very minimal. There are just two modules with some text based ads in them. I also love that they chose Adsense, but not for any particular reason…

Now, after you put in all of your interests and what not, you then have two basic options for styling your page. For novices, there is a basic design editor, letting you pick colors, and then drag and drop modules to arrange your layout. If you are more hardcore, you can attack the stylesheet of your page directly. I have only had my hands on it for a few days, but here are some before and afters of my basic CSS customization:

Basically, the customization is limitless.Designers should really be able to have fun with this thing. In fact, if you are a designer, you could start designing some themes for others. I plan on doing so myself. Now, I wish I could say that we will only see awesome designs, without unreadable color schemes, but if this site does catch on, that will probably be a by-product of its popularity. Oh well.

Overall, this is a great social networking site. It hasn’t reached a critical mass of subscribers, but with all of the buzz, it may be poised to do so very soon. So what are you waiting for? Go sign up! Oh, and don’t forget to add me as your friend!