There are 51 comments on this post. Add your own comment.

My biggest gripe is that the general public does not use it. I love the functionality, the design, the ease of pulling in content… however it’s all worthless because not enough people I know use it or are interested in using it. Facebook and Myspace own the realm and that is sad, but I’d rather be connected to my friends then have a cool looking site. So my Virb just sits there collecting dust.

said Joshua Tuscan

at 1:33pm on Thursday

It needs a girl to guy ratio of 10:1, specifically cute girls. Thank you.

said John Sherman Hoyt

at 1:33pm on Thursday

Too much good content goes virtually unnoticed… :)

said Simmy

at 1:39pm on Thursday

I love virb…

But I have to tell everyone who my friends are again? And convince them to move over?

Everything else is beautiful, but if there was some way to move everything over from other social networks, it sure would be easier.

said Josh Blount

at 1:55pm on Thursday

my biggest gripes are:

the video section is REALLY lacking. how to i browse the videos? I can’t find any way to browse the videos. i’d like to browse by category, and see what other people are watching.

i’m in the friends sections, I click on someone and I get a pop-up with a small link to get to their profile. I’d like to go immediately to their profile. i find this annoying. maybe you could stash a little edit or add tag links under their name.

does anybody else think that the virbage should be changed from your to my? such is “view my profile”, “my likes”, etc.

said ysbl

at 2:00pm on Thursday

I think there are too many steps to get to a friend’s profile page from my home screen.

I have to:
1. Click “Friends”
2. Click a friend’s picture, then
3. Click the “go to profile” link.

It’s not a deal breaker for me, but it’s always bugged me.

Mainly, though, I agree with Tuscan and Blount…It really bums me out that I can’t pull anybody else I know over to Virb, so my profile goes mostly unused.

I do check out a lot of the music on Virb, though - that music player is killer.

said Daniel

at 2:05pm on Thursday

I think the groups are a little weak - partially because of the lack of dialog on those pages (at least the groups I’m in). Plus these pages don’t really seem to offer any features that a normal personal profile does. They almost have the feeling of “OK I’m here, now what…?”

said Dan

at 2:23pm on Thursday

1.) Full agreement w/ ysbl and Daniel regarding getting to a profile.

2.) Blogs serve no purpose in my mind. Why would I ever want to visit a duplicate blog?

3.) I think there’s more potential on the “Virb Is” page. It seems a bit messy right now. I think mouseover text over the icons would be helpful in the featured content section, just to know who I’m clicking on w/out looking down to an abstract virb address.

I do love it more than I hate it.

said content is king

at 2:25pm on Thursday

Like a lot of other people, I would like to have more people/friends/MUSICAL ARTISTS on Virb.

Also, the “Recent Songs (VirbTunes)” section should display more than 5 songs . . . or perhaps there should be a setting that would allow a user to display more than 5 songs, or less than 5 songs, or whatever they want. Or perhaps this already exists and I just don’t know how to use it (I’m a new Virb-er).

But seriously, Virb rocks. Thanks for the willingness to make it even more rockin.

said Ernest

at 2:57pm on Thursday

I have to agree with Dan’s comment above - the GROUP feature merely just identifies interests that a person has. If there was a group discussion thread feature (a la Flickr), that would help keep discussions focused on specific questions/content/etc.

Like, I created a Polaroid group and once a person joins that group, the only thing they can really do is post a comment in the group. No meaningful interaction.

said Bradley Spitzer

at 3:06pm on Thursday

“[Groups] almost have the feeling of “OK I’m here, now what…?”

“…the only thing they can really do is post a comment in the group. No meaningful interaction.”

So true, friends. This will certainly be addressed.

Thanks everybody for the feedback so far - keep it coming.

said Joshua

Oooh, I like the new “Joshua” comments look. Higher contrast, and stands out much better from the rest of our comments than the previous style did.

said Daniel

at 3:11pm on Thursday

Since you can already use a Flickr feed for photos (on the homepage only), I wish the Photo area of VIRBº also showed those Flickr photos (and maybe even the sets) — just as the blog feeds are “kept” in the Blog area. The same probably goes for other types of xml feeds (Last.fm, etc) … where VIRB just parses the data of the feeds, and doesn’t bear the content/space load.

That’s all I can think of right now.

said Paul

at 3:25pm on Thursday

THE TOP 5 (in no particular order)
1. virbtunes: ability to reset plays, etc…
2. friends: too many steps to get to individual profiles (already mentioned in above comments)
3. adding friends: should be an ajax popup given when a person clicks on a friend image that says “want to: 1. add to friends, 2. go to profile, 3. send message, 4. leave comment” then when you click on “add to friends” you can click “okay” and add them w/o having to go to their profiles. (good for starving bands who are dying to be noticed.)
4. comment formatting: good effing grief! i hate leaving a comment where there ought to be line breaks and then i post the comment and everything is jumbled together.
i like to use line breaks
because they make life look a little
cleaner and easy to read.
besides, you can do haiku.
5. customizable “backend”: be the first company to allow users to customize their “home” layout the same way they customize their profiles and such.

said Zach McNair

at 3:30pm on Thursday

I think those issues of “pulling” people over to VIRB is an overall marketing position — time is on the side of MySpace and Facebook; VIRB is a very new venture; the “sneezers” are out there doing their work to spread the word (which includes us); but it takes a long time to break a person’s habit, perception and comfort. They use MySpace or Facebook not because they work the best, or look the best, but because they’re used to it. It takes time, consistency and good word of mouth to break into any new (and somewhat saturated market). Just my 2¢

said Paul

at 3:31pm on Thursday

i agree with paul and the others. ive showed Virb to a ton of friends and every single one of them is blowed away and will say some variation of “this is wayyy better than myspace”. however, they sign up once and never visit again because the world lives on myspace.

also, too much work to get to friend profiles.

on the upside, you guy’s have done right in so many areas, so keep up the good work.

said general lee

at 3:44pm on Thursday

I agree with paul on the fact that word of mouth just isn’t doing enough in this market. However I don’t believe its too saturated to be reckoned with. Virb is THE best out there and people like us commenting here are committed to making it a success but I think Virb itself should put forth some MORE effort.

That being said, dont make me click three times to view someones profile. Let me customize what happens on my home screen and give me dad gum rss feeds of virbtunes and pictures. allow me to delete my flickr and last.fm accounts. having one place is awesome.

BTW the exclusivity of Virb in its early stages was great marketing. Sad to see a lot of the marketing go down hill from there. Offer some purevolume profile import straight into Virb or something to gain a already huge crowd in PV.

said Austen

at 4:04pm on Thursday

@Zach I’m pretty sure VIRB does allow you to customize your profiel page using CSS, I just find that it’s too difficult for the lay person to know how to do that. Could VIRB give easy to use instructions on how to Customize the layout of the VIRB page using CSS? I’d also love to learn how to use VIRB comonants such as the music player on my own homepage like Blankenship does on his. Are there any resources for learning how to do that Josh?

said James

at 4:08pm on Thursday

Maybe I can’t find it, but it seems that virbtunes only works with itunes. So using winamp, I can’t show the world what I’m listening to.

Virb is great, I love the customization, and how hard it is to make your page ugly (I tried, and the result is still better looking than any myspace page I’ve seen.

Basically the word just needs to get out to stop using myspace and start using virb.

Oh and agreeing that it’s too many steps to get to your friend’s profiles.

virb.com should offer free sex like Myspace did back in the day. That’s where the userbase is.

said Chris M

at 4:11pm on Thursday

I would like to be able to pull in Flickr feeds based on tag. That way I could tag my Flickr images with “Virb” and then only those images would show up in my profile.

Other than that I like it enough and it’s by far the best social network. I just don’t have time to keep it up.

said Renaud

at 4:35pm on Thursday

How about a feature that would tell you how many degree of separation you are to any given user? Say you were just mulling about and it had a tag that said “2 degrees of separation” and you click on it to see how that person is connected to you. Sounds like some advanced coding, but that would be kind of cool and encourage friends of friends to network.

said Renaud

at 4:38pm on Thursday

@James, I was referring to the main page of VIRBº. I know you can customize profiles. I’m proficient in that. However, I would like to reorganize my “backend” or “my home” layout of VIRBº, as well as make it more towards my style. That kind of freedom is not likely to be given to users, but it’d be a great thing to have.

By the way, MySpace just added “status updates” today. Yet, another reason why I hate MySpace and why it’s giving more people reasons to stick with it. EFF! I still hate it’s “home” layout. Then again, there’s nothing I like particularly about MySpace except that .. um.. wait. No. Nothing about it I like anymore.

said Zach McNair

at 4:54pm on Thursday

Oh, the whole “mutual friends” thing and the whole “select users in a particular network” thing that Facebook has is quite handy.

.. not a necessity, but handy.
Viewing relationships between people is great.

said Zach McNair

at 4:58pm on Thursday

A feature that I like that Myspace has is the “Last Seen” feature on someone’s profile..

said Harry

at 6:00pm on Thursday

Instant updates on our Virb page modules. If I upload pictures to Flickr, I want it to appear on my Virb page RIGHT NOW.

Kisses!

said Anthony

at 6:49pm on Thursday

Fashion / Photography / Design / Comedy / Art / Sports / Compassion…..”This page has been prepped, properly anesthetized and is currently undergoing major reconstructive surgery.”

Are these pages ever going to BE anything?? That was something I was really looking forward to when I first joined. Discovering new stuff…seeing cool content…etc.

Also, it takes too many clicks to actually get to a blog post. Makes it a pain.

Less clicks to “entry” would be nice too. That is, just make it easier to add stuff from the Home page.

said Ben D.

at 7:06pm on Thursday

Even though I’m not using it yet, I love that you can pull blogs from another source via RSS and not have to do double-entry. I’d like to see RSS functionality expanded into other areas. For example:

I’ve got some friends in a band and one of the biggest hurdles for them to mainting social networks is “show dates” - it would great if they could just pull dates off their existing website via RSS. Put youself in their shoes, if a show changes at the last minute, they’ve got to go to myspace, facebook, purevolume, virb, their website, etc. and change all that show info.

A separate, selfish request would be for the ability to have more than 150 photos stored in my profile. :-)

said Grant Blakeman

at 7:36pm on Thursday

I’d like to see more hott chicks sending me invites to their spam profiles. PLZ more ads! :P

In all seriousness.. I like Virb the way it is, however I’m sure there are a few things that could make it better. I’m not nearly smart enough to point that out.. but I’d like to see more people there. I’d also like to have the music player look a little nicer.. it’s a little bubbly right now.. Groups are kinda useless. Adding people without reloading the page would be nice also. Stuff like that.. just polish work mostly.

said Jerrett Fowler

at 9:37pm on Thursday

I love Virb…

But everyone is on Facebook - and despite the general ugliness of facebook - it works pretty good. No band spam and just what all my friends & I need to keep in touch, chill, and organize events…

All my “non-technical” or “non-artistic” friends could care less about Virb (too confusing, too small, not sure what to do with Virb is what I’ve been told) so Facebook it is for now…

said Brooke Novak

at 11:22pm on Thursday

I wouldn’t compete against Myspace or Facebook. I would concentrate on Virb. Realizing that Virb isn’t going to be for everyone and that is okay. It’s the strategy that worked for Apple. They realized that even a 6% market share of a ton of people is a lot of business.

Virb works for me because there are people I want to connect with that seem interesting, love good music, good design and like to tweak their profiles. Finding those people among Myspace is daunting and hard to do because Myspace themselves do not embrace those qualities. I don’t go to Utah looking for Democrats.

If you create a network of a niche demographic that are first adopters (I bought an iPhone!), are looking for new music and expect and love quality over being treated as a lowest common denominator than you can get some choice companies who will want to advertise to that demographic, choice bands who will want to profile to that audience and choice people Virbees will want to network with.

said Renaud

at 12:41am on Friday

i think my biggest thing would be the music and video player. i don’t like the big bulky thing. but maybe that’s just me.

said dan simmons

at 1:59am on Friday

The video player chokes alot.

said Jeremy Ricketts

at 2:16am on Friday

Oh, just thought of another idea, not a hate, just an idea…

Make bands and companies be another category, so up at the top of the navigation you have “friends bands music etc” It’d just help to separate the real people from the “ads” cause face it, when a band creates a profile on a social networking site, it’s just an ad for a product. I just think it would be neat to be able to separate people from non-people.

said Chris M

at 8:11am on Friday

I really want to love Virb and use it all the time, but I find I don’t for a couple reasons.

The first reason is not that many people are on it. Yes the internet trend saavy people are, but it was the same with Myspace, it took about a year before everyone I knew was on it. I hate Myspace, but since all my friends are already there that’s where they message me, it seems to be the preferred mode of communication over email.

The second reason is, even if all my friends were on Virb, I don’t want to go to the trouble of finding them. I have about a 300+ person friendlist. If there was some way to import this list and automatically add the people who are also on Virb this would be fabulous.

Lastly, I really really like the music feature. But I’ve already got Lastfm / Audioscrobbler. I don’t want to have 50 things going at once all to track my tweets and bookmarks and music. I wish Virb could just import my data from Lastfm.

said beth

at 8:13am on Friday

To borrow the tagline from my PureVolume brothers, we’re listening to you.

You guys are awesome. Keep hating/suggesting. We’ll keep working.

said Joshua

I would like to be able to sign in just using a username. does anyone else find it annoying that you have to enter your email address?! Almost all other sites (besides facebook) that you log in to don’t require an email login. at this point it would probably be too big of an undertaking…

Also, on people’s personal pages, in the recent activity area, what about dividing that in to sections? like have blogs, photos, music, etc sections that lists the recent friend activity in each of those areas. so under the blogs section, i would get a list of 5 friends who’ve recently added blogs.

also, i concur on the groups. not much going on there.

said ysbl

at 10:03am on Friday

I saw it mentioned several times, but I’ll ad my comment to increase the perceived severity of the issue. When clicking on a friend in your friends list, it should go directly to the friend’s profile. That popup crap is one of the most annoying things i’ve ever seen. I like the idea of providing more control over those friends within your account, but there’s plenty of better ways to implement that functionality. There may be some other small things I can’t think of, but that’s the one that always makes me cry.

said Joey Ciccoline

at 10:40am on Friday

I’d say my biggest issue with it, is that it’s not practical. What substance does it serve. Someone tell me seriously that they would go to virb for content. I highly doubt lots of people go to it, just to see the homepage for the chance of catching a new band or recommendation. And common, I literally see 1 person post bulletins all the time.

While executed great, the substance is still the same, and you still dead end on a friends profile with nothing to do once you get there. In my opinion it’s a really well designed graveyard, where everyone signs up and says ok what do I do now.

said Madrid

at 11:09am on Friday

Also, sorry I hope that didn’t come across rude. What I should have said is that there should be more motivation directed towards innovation within the idea of the social network itself. I know it can be done!

said Madrid

at 11:14am on Friday

I agree with Madrid 150%.

Also, I won’t post anymore videos on Virb because the compression screws with framerates and stuff. That’s probably just a limitation of the type of video presentation that it is, and for a site like this anything better might not really be feasible. It’s for similar reasons that I avoid YouTube and MySpace video in the first place. However, if Virb is to be a place where creative professionals like photographers and filmmakers and such can display their wares, then maybe a certain level of quality might be worth it. If the video function is only ever intended to be along the lines of a YouTube or MySpace video then I say it is doing a fabulous job, and much better than those other two.

said Joey Ciccoline

at 11:26am on Friday

Time zones! I can’t say it loud enough. I’ve send a suggestion thingy about it once or twice, but to no avail. It may not seem like a big deal to some people, but it really bothers me. I want to know what time someone sent me a message without having to decode what time zone it’s stamped with.

said Reese

at 11:34am on Friday

Ability to change the color of video player when embedding. If you can do this already color me badd.

Fixing the blog import on organization profiles would be good too. But I ain’t hatin’

said Jeremy

at 12:25pm on Friday

This may have already been mentioned, but just like there is a way to limit or expand the number of friends shown, I’d really like to be able to limit the number of comments shown on my main page to say…5.

said Ben

at 1:31pm on Friday

Broken down into numbered items which could be printed and passed around the office, for ease of use, really.

1. One click profile viewing

2. When adding a new profile photo it shouldn’t automatically appear in your “photos” section. And/or have option to activate “automatically send profile photo to photos” option.

3. Ability to batch edit friends, photos, videos, etc.

4. Ability to edit VirbTunes content via CSS, I think you can do this, but it’s lacking. Should be able to edit VirbTunes titles too. (eg - instead of “Top Artists (VirbTunes)” I could change it to “The Best Of The Rest”)

5. Think about reformatting code in your “customize / advanced / css” section. Should be easier to filter through content you can change and can’t change. Although I have completely customized my page before, it was tricky knowing what would break it and what wouldn’t without hardcore testing. In short, better commenting.

6. A “placeholder” section should be available, so when your editing your profile and testing stuff, you can see a “preview” of your layout before you post the final version. So people don’t see a broken apart profile page Basically add a step for super-advanced users to test with.

7. Picky, but, on the “Play / Pause” button on the video player, you’ve imported PNG’s into flash. These should be vectors because the “circle” gets pixelated on the right and left edges, in the middle. I think someone was in Photoshop and kept using the “contract” tool, which leaves circles looking a little bit skewed.

8. Also, the “scrubber” area of the video player is jagged on the left and right side, use more corner radius to get a better rounded effect or make it two pixels taller. It looks a little amateurish.

9. Other stuff coming soon

said M.A.T.

at 5:56pm on Friday

Chris M. said: “face it, when a band creates a profile on a social networking site, it’s just an ad for a product. I just think it would be neat to be able to separate people from non-people.”

I have to completely disagree with this. I am a “band” but at least 90% of my Virb / MySpace / Facebook interaction is personal. I know lots of other musicians who are on the same page with me on that one.

said TLC

at 12:06am on Saturday

I have felt you guys have done the catching up with other social networks on features, but I think that in innovation and redefining what you do on social network is in order. Especially if you want to attrach people over to virb and have them come back.

Right now I see it more as a museum of good art and music, but I want to see more user interaction with the content. Not just commenting.

said Patrick Born

at 11:01am on Saturday

The only thing that has bugged me is the meta module… it’s a table.. what can I do with a table?!
of course it is possible with css to hide the photo and other non-important stuff and then us only the name, but maybe are little modules with only your name or profile photo an option? or have I overlooked something?

said Leon

at 2:15pm on Tuesday

Oh still some comments:
I think the music player is to big..
Are the imported blog post excluded from google? duplicate content is bad for google page rank…

said Leon

at 2:24pm on Tuesday

Here are my thoughts..

http://www.blog.ethanbodnar.com/2007/07/18/virb/

said Ethan Bodnar

at 12:11pm on Wednesday

virbtunes (windows) needs to stay in the background. I hate that when it can’t find the server it feels the need to tell me with an alert box, everytime. Let it keep trying in the background, don’t pop up an error message telling me it couldn’t find the server… i’m a fan and I like virbtunes, but virbtunes is meant to run in the background, and while nice - is not important enough for me to drop what I am doing and try to figure out why it can’t connect to the server (is it my connection, is it virb servers, what?)…

Let it run, successfully or unsuccessfully in the background.

said Chriswho

at 9:16am on Friday

Just got the error again so now I can quote it…
“HTTP Ping Send Failed” - VirbTunes

said Chriswho

at 9:24am on Friday

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