Virb is to MySpace as Aphrodite is to well, MySpace.
Home to the worst 1998-looking, blink-tag-bearing, rainbow-background, browser-crashing designs of all time, MySpace is a single justification why page design should be left to the pros. That said, I know the masses love to spray comments containing 1400px wide images of monkeys smoking, so I’d rather it happen in a container like MySpace than spread all over the net. At least they’re not clogging my blog pipes with greasy design hairballs.
I’m not anti-MySpace. Shoot, I’ve got a MySpace page. I even have posted hypocritical pictures of my dog. Further, we’ve had jobs designing or pimping-out MySpace pages. (aside: For all you CSS heads out there, designing around the MySpace caveats is like trying to dial a cell phone with your foot. Your left foot.) For those of us viewing a MySpace member page whose design God himself is ashamed of, there is no way to bypass all that nastiness and just get to the meat of who the member’s friends are, or if we share an affinity for potato skins.
Enter Virb. I heard about this social network from the Net@Nite podcast with Amber MacArthur and Leo Laporte. Virb takes all the features of what a social networking site should be, and wraps it in beautiful, compliant, standards based layout. After setting up my page in Virb and poking around, it seems like the audience is much more refined than the riff-raff that has spoiled MySpace, although much smaller. I’m sure it must be growing.
Virb is totally customizable. They provide you with hooks for the modules, and you are free to design your page using HTML and CSS, but no JavaScript. Liberate yourself from pasting code into your bio, this is how customization should be.
Best of all, every Virb member page has a button at the top offering the equivalent of the much loved “skip intro”. It’s called the “Remove Customization” button, and it’s almost worth paying for. This button instantly allows you to view any Virb member page in a standard, unified format, without any of the member customization.
So, go for it. Impress your neighbors with animated Pokemon emoticons and Borat backgrounds. I’ll be the one who has taped down the “Remove Customization” button.
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