Back in the day when I first got word that the great folks behind Purevolume were coming out with a social network I got excited. Well, Virb finally came out and I never really got involved that much in it. I use it to discover some great musicians and band, but other than that, I don’t use it that much. Facebook is where all of my friends are at, even the bloggers who appear in my feed reader every day are on Facebook now. But, I recently went back and logged into my account at Virb and started fooling around. This is what I found and what I would like to see in the future.

The way I see it Virb is a different kind of social network. It is one for people who like to make things look good and use things that look good. For the artists who like a good looking social network. I saw somewhere someone call it the “designers version of Myspace. Just because all of my friends aren’t on Virb doesn’t mean that there is no value for me. I can use it to connect with artists, musicians, bloggers, and more.

So far, Virb has gotten some things right. They allow you to integrate Flickr, added widescreen video, made easy to track what music you are listening to with VirbTunes, and more. Furthermore, the way the allow you to customize your profile is very well done along with the ability to turn customization off. Some people have done a really nice job customizing their profiles.

But I do have some suggestion for it and from what I have heard the Virb team is busy working on improving Virb as we talk. Here is what I would like to see at Virb in the coming months.

-More integration from other web applications and communities like they did with Flickr.
-It takes too many clicks to view your friends profile.
-Some beautiful custom CSS themes for those non programmers among us.
-That Google advertisement at the bottom is huge. I am guessing they just put that there temporarily until they figured out their advertising strategy, at least I hope so. I think that they have a huge opportunity to develop there own non-intrusive advertising platform. They could allow ads to be targeted based on profile information.
-The Virb Blog is a little lacking. I think they could blog a lot more. But maybe that’s just me.
-They still have yet to add the “Virb is…” section. When they do this it could be huge. Allowing the users to find content and other people through this could be great.
-Since a lot of people on Virb are of the creative type, I think they could add a feature for Projects where people could highlight what they are working on in the profile and in the “Virb is…”section. This way others could offer feedback and people could share their projects.

That is all I have to say. I see an awesome future for Virb!

Check out my Virb profile here. (still being worked on)
Check out the blog by the company who makes Virb called The Big Noob.
Check out what other people are saying at Joshua Blankenship’s blog where he asks for feedback on Virb.