Virb, a social network that melds some of the customization options seen on MySpace with a mature and media-heavy atmosphere, has just launched a completely overhauled version of its service. The new site sports a very attractive new interface, reworked backend, and new social features that make it an impressive upgrade to the original, which launched in 2007. In conjunction with Virb’s reintroduction, hosting provider MediaTemple has annouced that it has set up a new venture platform called (mt) Ventures, which acquired Virb last summer and has also acquired and invested in several other projects.
Virb originally launched its social network in 2007 as something of an experiment, and has since grown to a user base of around 250,000 users, including many musicians who use the site to share their music and find fans. But its developers say that they weren’t quite ready to keep up with the site’s growth, nor could they adapt quickly enough to encourage new waves of users. So rather than try to tweak the codebase they’d created, the Virb team decided to start anew, and have spent the last 18 months rebuilding their social network into something much more robust than its previous incarnation.
Rather than try to replace the dominant players in the social network space, the Virb team acknowledges that most people have already established online presences at other social networks like MySpace and Facebook. They explain that Virb is meant to help fill the gap left by these other networks, and is meant as enhancement – not a replacement – to those networks users may already belong to.
To reflect this, the site’s biggest addition is a social activity aggregator comparable to FriendFeed, but with a social network wrapped around it. Users can import photos from Flickr, stories from their RSS reader, and other content from the growing number of social sites on the web with an API. But many of these activities can also be accomplished using Virb itself – for example, it has a rich music player/sharing tool and photo galleries, putting a strong emphasis on media sharing. These features are meant to attract new Virb users who may not already have fulfilled these needs elsewhere, without alienating those who have.
The site has also expanded on the ‘Friends List’ concept found on Facebook. Dubbed ‘Circles’, the site lets users separate their friends into groups. Users can then choose to selectively show items in their News Feed from a certain Circle of friends, allowing them to quickly weed through the updates they don’t care about. Eventually the site will also allow users to send a photo or event invitation to a certain Circle, without having to worry about any privacy settings they may have previously set for those friends.
Another major improvement is the abilty for users to ’skin’ their profiles. Previously the site has supported full HTML customization (and continues to) but many users don’t know how to use it. Skins are similar to WordPress themes, in that they can totally change the appearance of a profile – these aren’t just color palette swaps. The new skins allow users to differentiate themselves, and also allow users to drag-and-drop widgets in their profiles to rearrange their layouts. Such customization can come at a price, as evidenced by many annoyingly distracting and ugly profiles on MySpace. Virb used to get around this issue by offering a button at the top of every page that allowed users to turn the customization off for the profile they were viewing. But the company says that because its demographic tends to skew towards a more mature audience, few people ever used it it so they took it out (they promise to reintroduce it should the need arise).
Virb’s biggest challenge will in the fact that it is yet another social network, swimming in a vast sea of competitors struggling to catch up to the likes of Bebo, MySpace, and Facebook. Granted, Virb has built up a userbase of over 250,000, including many musicians keen on sharing their music, but they’ve still got a long way to go. And while Virb’s emphasis on media may differentiate it in some ways from those major players, there are other sites like Multiply with a similar media bent. That said, the site looks really nice, so I wouldn’t count these guys out by any means.
Disclosure: MediaTemple is TechCrunch’s hosting provider and is a TC sponsor.
Interesting my host is now doing this… cool.
Always loved the service of MediaTemple. Glad to see them back this.
Virb looks quite interesting. I, for one, certainly will join there
I’m usually pretty skeptical about new social networks (we see a ton of them), but this one seems really polished.
Would love to get an invite to reinvigorate.net if anyone has any, or if they’re reading this = ) I have applied on the website too. The service looks awesome. Well done to MT!
looks like they were influenced by tumblr.com
Tumblr’s their next target!
I have always been a big fan of Virb and have really wanted to see the site take off. Maybe it will finally happen now.
Does this version come with users, or are they saving that for version 12?
Congrats to Chris, Simmy, Dave and the rest of the folks over at Virb and (mt)! I know Chris and Dave have been slaving over the backend and code.
Nice!
–Joe
Interesting history addition:
There used to be a site called MP3.com. It started as a way for bands to share singles for free. Some entrepreneurs tried to revamp it into a music-in-the-cloud offering. They demoed it for the record industry, who sued them into oblivion. (The RIAA claimed the very demo itself constituted copyright infringement).
Some college kids from Boston started a much prettier version of the original MP3.com called PureVolume. Unfortunately, MySpace has stolen a lot of mindshare in the indie music space, so a lot of people no longer update PureVolume. That sucks because PureVolume was/is a sweet site.
The guys who made PureVolume started a side-project called Virb and focused their energies there.
I’m not affiliated with any of this – I just like stories. I have no idea if the (mt) incarnation of Virb is still affiliated with PureVolume.
The fact that MediaTemple owns Virb means they have subjected it to their extremely sucky hosting system. So Virb has to not only compete with 2 million other social networks, but they also have to deal with tons of downtime, lost data and hosting glitches… DOA
I, on the other hand, have never experienced any significant and unscheduled downtime (I can back up my statement with an external site uptime checker). Just letting you know.
And this Virb social network looks impressive. I’ll take a further look later today.
True dat! MT isn’t a great host but they are brilliant when it comes to turning their users into raving fan boys.
It’s amazing how right you are. I can’t understand that, in the hosting industry MT is not well respected at all for their hosting issues, but their users are crazy about them! How do they do it? Beautiful web design? Huge incentives for referrals? Fun parties they throw?
I have been trying to figure this out. The “glowing” endorsements by people led me to try out mt. It turns out they have trouble like the other hosting companies and in some cases more, I have experiences several site and email outages with no real explanation, other than it is a “new” platform.
Oh well. Love the mt support for the tech community and I am still a customer, for now.
A great book is called, “Customer satisfaction is worthless, customer loyalty is priceless”. I am a loyal customer of (mt) because they are professional, provide excellent 24/7/365 support, and their Hosting with a few exceptions is rock solid.
Their (dv)’s are rock solid. Their previous traditional shared hosting was and still is rock solid (some customers apparently still use it and haven’t migrated to the grid service platform). The (gs) is the only system of their that has really had any problems and it hasn’t even been widespread across the entire grid service.
Sometimes it’s just a particular storage segment that only affects a few customers, other times it’s a MySQL server which again only affects the few customers on that machine. I personally have never had any significant unscheduled downtime so why wouldn’t I be a fan?
Check out what the “Terms” of contacting the new venture company behind the “new” Virb – (mt) ventures – has to say about contacting them:
“Your submissions of ideas will automatically become the property of (mt) Media Temple, without any compensation or other rights to you; (mt) Media Temple may use, modify or reproduce the ideas for any purpose and in any way and for an unlimited period of time, including giving your ideas to others;”
Looks like fun!
Very interesting… looks real fun!
I hope Virb eventually becomes THE social network for all the creative folks. It certainly deserves it.
Personally, I wish MediaTemple would fix their Grid-Service uptime issues before they spend money on crap like this.
This has nothing to do with the (gs) and is irrelevant.
Congrats, everything looks amazing.. good to see Mt in the news
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looking good.
Looks amazing.
(mt) is really a perfect service provider, they always do care its customers, even a individual person.
great to see MT doing this sort of thing. integration with the account center could be interesting…
Verb is def going to take off. Big ups to you Dave.
(mt) is awesome! Virb is dope. (mt) is so far beyond most companies, keep it up
i don’t get it. nothing there expect pretty buttons.
You say that Virb tries to fill in the gaps that other social networking sites are lacking. This is a good strategy and this site’s only shot if they actually want to grab an online presence, but is it realistic? Won’t the bigger sites like Facebook simply fill in these gaps more quickly and extensively, as they have more powerful resources that the smaller sites don’t have? Is the internet an example of “the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer,” as seen most explicitly in social networking sites?