So all the cool internet types are heading over to the latest social networking site, VIRB°. Who am I to get left behind right? So I got myself an invite and have spent the last two days tweaking every little thing in my profile and trying to find new friends.
The design of this place is definitely "web 2.0" with lots of gloss and clean pastels, much more appealing than the hideousness that is myspace. Part of the reason that I refused to get on myspace was the concentration on "hooking up" that seems to be a part of the service (not to mention the auto-playing music which I hate hate hate). I mean I don't care how tall my friend is or what kind of body build they have...I just want to find interesting people to chat with. I'm not into the popularity contests or the random inviting of friends when I've never said a word to them online. That being said, I'm realizing how difficult it really is to break into a new social circle online.
When I joined Friendster way back when it was because I had friends who were already members and then my other friends followed suit. Now that I'm starting from scratch on Virb I'm finding it hard to just randomly approach people and add them as friends (I'm still working on getting some Friendster friends to make the jump). Most people have a circle of acquaintances and if that's not the case they are just finding interesting profiles and blindly adding them as friends. Maybe it's just me, but I'm a little uncomfortable with labeling someone a friend if I've never had any interaction with them. You gotta love socializing in the internet age...
The service itself has a lot of great features, including integration with Flickr and pretty much unlimited customization of layout and content using css/html. For those myspace and last.fm types you'll be happy to know it's made by the same people who brought us PureVolume, so there's music integration as well. I anticipate that bands will come aboard and create official pages much like they have on myspace and there are already available players that you can embed into your page (and they don't auto-play...imagine THAT). I will continue to stick with last.fm because I have a large catalog of tracks already logged there, but for those of you starting out this is a great place to begin.
If not for the lack of integration with RSS (which I read is coming soon, and will make me able to include this blog) and last.fm (which I can understand since they are pushing a competitor) this would be my perfect profile site. As it stands I'm looking forward to making new friends, especially since that my early browsing has shown me that most of the members are a little older, more mature, and have a better eye for design than the myspacers. Friendster has gotten long in the tooth, still refuses to let me integrate my blog content (even though it's own blogging software is powered by Typepad), and runs dog slow every time I try to log in, so this will be my social home for the time being.
Those of you looking for invites can drop me a line, I have a bunch of them left and am more than willing to pass them out as long as you provide an email address for me to send them to and a name you want it sent to. If you don't want to leave this in the comments of this post just use the "email me" link to leave me a message.
Lame. I thought this would be about $10. Lame.
Posted by: Julie | 03/27/2007 at 03:59 PM