A couple of thoughts on Virb

I’m not exactly sure why, but I’ve had quite a few people either post comments on hyalineskies or e-mail me asking for my opinions on Virb, a social networking service developed by the design-awesome Unborn Media, the same company that runs PureVolume. Virb is the new hot kid on the block. Virb is — well, to the Web 2.0 user, at least — something like a new pink.

I’ve had some time to play around with Virb, and while my profile is currently barren, I’ll vouch for its super-modularity and ability to actually be designed prettily without an obscene amount of HTML/CSS hackery. While Virb is certainly getting a lot of buzz with my fellow 9rulers, I’m going to come in and rain on the parade. Virb is nice, it really is, but it’s definitely got a long, long way to go to beat social network monoliths such as Facebook or MySpace.

Let’s play venture capitalist

Although this question generally carries with it a lot of hedonic calculation, tons of research and probably a few paper-pushing interns, it’s still a very good way to gain insight into a web service’s potential adoption: what’s the value? While this is still a pretty abstract question, a bit of very superficial research into Virb’s own marketing lingo and people’s premature love of the network will show the values that people think (or, in the case of marketing, what Virb thinks people think) are important about the service. From my rather limited evaluation, the biggest lures to Virb are:

• It’s prettier Virb is, for all intents and purposes, the supermodel of the social networking world with a very clean design for equally clean-designing people. The codebase blows MySpace’s hacked-together ColdFusion disaster out of the water and has design-level customisation options that Zuckerberg and Co. have forcefully left out of Facebook.
• It’s got real design-ability As I quickly touched on in the last point, Virb has absolutely awesome customisation properties, allowing any competent standards-based designer full freedom over the design and layout of their profile. They give you structure-level access to your profiles much like a WordPress blog does, leaving the potential for cool design unmatched by anything else I’ve ever used.
• It’s “MySpace for grownups” Fellow 9ruler Blogger and 9rules Reader cristinamarie seems all about Virb, the service she called “MySpace for grownups.”

So it’s prettier. So what?

I won’t deny that Virb — not the user profiles, but the actual system itself — is quite beautiful. The service’s overall UI is solid and definitely has a clean appearance that MySpace obviously does not; however, this is not exactly a means to success. MySpace has taken off and exists in an extremely popular state without any real design much to the grimacing of UI designers and developers worldwide; Facebook, which obviously has a much greater UI than that of MySpace, didn’t gain its success because of its superior design: instead, Facebook owes much of its success to its now-nonexistent college-only functionality and relatively excellent privacy tools. The superficialities of a social network’s interface don’t really seem to matter in the end.

Well the profiles are easier to design.

The capabilities given to a designer on a Virb profile are leaps and bounds above everyone else, and Virb’s beta rounds have brought in a select group of people (such as Kristin Pishdadi) who have the web design know-how to turn out a truly beautiful profile design. There are plenty of users on Virb who have built something beautiful with Virb’s modular capabilities. It’s customisable in the way MySpace isn’t.

That said, as designers we’re extremely shortsighted to believe that Virb’s aesthetic qualities will continue in their superior form as less design-oriented users sign on to the network. MySpace has plenty of so-called “designers” building profiles with entirely invalid code, terrible table-based systems, and CSS that makes the standardista collapse and cry. Those of us using the div overlay method obviously have to hack up MySpace in a fairly nasty way, but even the hack-by-necessity code written by people such as Derek Punsalan and I is nothing compared to the disasters floating around for MySpace users that don’t know a DOCTYPE from their HMO list. As the userbase expands, the code inferiority is bound to skyrocket, and with it so will the annoyances of being able to customise anything at all. The veritable pixel-circus that MySpace has turned into is a primary reason why Facebook is so vigilant in cutting down those who want any bit of style in their profiles: in the end, the site becomes unusable under the control of its own users.

Making things worse, designing a module or two for Virb isn’t anywhere near as challenging as developing something truly awesome on MySpace, thus actually decreasing the learning curve for a vast majority of those building Virb modules. This will most likely lead to more bad news as Dreamweaver-built, WYSIWYG disasters begin to appear across the open Virb network. Sure, you can use the “Remove Customization” button that Virb (thankfully) has, but the majority of users can’t tell good design from bad design, and the population will decrease the overall aesthetic value of the network.

Users: going down in flames

As is true with any beta, the users on the network now — a paltry 5,770 (3,809 male; 1,961 female) at this time of writing — will decrease rapidly in quality. Beta users are the edge of the adoption curve: those currently in Virb are just the tip of an iceberg, the innovators and early adopters of tons of technologies, and the early adopter’s abilities, qualifications and user preferences are a small minority of those that will need to sign on to make Virb a successful social network contender. The users currently on the social network are (for the most part) the grownups that cristinamarie was talking about: they’re all fairly mature, dedicated in some way to better content and able to help Virb’s developers debug the service for public use. This type of user is unfortunately light-years away from the common social network user that fills MySpace or Facebook, and the userbase will be quickly diluted with such lusers (sic) if Virb ever gains traction. The only way to maintain Virb’s current user quality is through restricting invites to the network or to offer applications to join the social network, and both will require more administrative time and restrict the growth of the network dramatically. (One could argue that we’re already seeing user dilution as more and more are invited.)

It ain’t looking good.

Virb is pretty awesome, it really is, but nothing gold can stay, and Virb is a perfect example of that. Virb will eventually have to choose between growth or quality — after a point, both aren’t possible simultaneously — and most likely, to appease venture capitalists and build the social network into something larger, they’ll choose growth. After all, Virb really doesn’t have any features that push the network into something more competitive than MySpace aside from its designer quality, which, without restriction and exclusivity, will quickly be destroyed by its userbase. Sorry guys, but I’m not feeling the whole Virb craze: it’s more Web 2.0 fun that really doesn’t offer any benefit or any advantage in the end.

Invites I’ve got a ton of Virb invites. If you’re a hyalineskies reader and would like one, e-mail me at eston@hyalineskies.com with your favourite hyalineskies post, why it’s your favourite, and why you’d be a good Virb user.

Comments

Comments RSS Feed for “this post”

External Discussion

No trackbacks have been posted to this article yet.