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supposed Myspace-killer virb.com had its public launch a week or so ago. for those who haven’t checked it out: virb claims to be “Myspace done right” (that’s not the official tagline of course, rather the meme that’s been spreading). “done right” in a techno-elitist way the majority of Myspace-users would never care about. somehow hardcore Myspacers don’t seem to be bothered that their profile is rendered in 90ies-HTML and screaming of awful colours & crappy widgets…meanwhile a loud minority (which I admittedly have been a part of for most time) is whining about these exact same issues (while happily tuning their own Myspace pages). however, while virb has received a warm welcome from this crowd, I’m quite disappointed after toying around with it for a few hours. so without further ado, here’s my top 10 reasons why virb in its current incarnation sucks big time:

• virb is not open - in fact it’s way more sealed up than Myspace ever was. virb currently supports external flash-content from YouTube, Google and a few other approved popular service only. compare that to the widget-ecosystem which has emerged around Myspace for the past 2 years. bidirectional content syndication from and to social networks might turn out crucial. it will be exciting to see Myspace’ anticipated/dreaded policy shifts in 2007.
• virb is hard to syndicate - I haven’t found a single RSS-feed yet. not even on my personal blog (c’Mon, even myspace offers RSS-feeds, though without full content)
• virb ain’t valid - agreed, virb’s code is lightyears ahead of Myspace’s, but does it validate against current web-standards? not really.
• virb is poorly communicating itself - I was suprised that virb isn’t using the merits of blogging to communicate with its userbase.
• virb is a silo - there is currently no way (i.e. API) to get data out of a virb-account (except of course by content-scraping). since social networking is almost commoditized (check People Aggregator or Ning) by now, and most users have realized they want to be part of numerous networks instead of one monolithic, this is probably a bad move.
• but most of all: virb is a lonely place (currently only 35 users based in Austria). sure, it’s kinda unfair to compare a service just started with Myspace’ community of +100mio users. but in the end, size-of-community is exactly the key-feature of any closed down, centralized social network as is virb or Myspace.

(ok, that was only 7 issues, sorry for cheating on the headline )

of course, all of this won’t matter in the end. virb is better than Myspace in many aspects (technically), but come on, that wasn’t sooo hard to achieve, right? I’m pretty sure some of above issues will be fixed soon (RSS), and I hope virb will change its policy regarding others (openness). still, my biggest problem with virb is that it doesn’t add anything to social networking as such, featurewise. yasn - yet another social network.

currently virb is artifically keeping accounts scarce by limiting the no. of signups per day, but according to the countdown, demand is not very high. if you need an invite anyhow, drop me a comment! if you disagree and think virb rocks, drop me a comment as well!

update: there are a few responses, some positive, and some negative. of course it’s unfair to compare the community-size of Myspace to virb, but I think I pointed that out in the first place.

currently in private beta, Teapotters is a community for 3D-artists sharing their creations. models are rendered in browser using the 3D Life Player-plugin.

leading music-recommendation service Pandora introduced some community-related features earlier this week (check their official blog for the full scope). however, listener-profiles (including listings of tracks which received most thumbs-ups & -downs) and a very basic search for listeners, artists & stations can’t really keep up with advanced community-features offered by last.fm. f.e., Pandora lacks last.fm’s ‘Musical Neighbours’, a feature that connects listeners by their shared tastes. on the upside, the new user-profiles allow to instantly playback bookmarked tracks on-demand. for now, I suggest to use PandoraFM, a mashup combining the best of both of products by submitting Pandora-playlists into Last.fm’s listener-history.

ps: if you’re interested in music-theory and the categorization Pandora is based on, you might want to check out the Pandora Podcast, featuring Kevin Seal, who works as a musical analyst at Pandora.

Tooum’s Switchboard (currently in public beta) is a free, hosted service integrating popular blogging-features with classic discussion-based forum-functioniality. although Switchboard offers only very limited functionality at the moment, the basic idea seems appealing and could very well lead to a solid Wordpress-plugin…

experimenting with Splice for the first time is quite an experience: using a flash-based online-sequencer, users arrange audio-loops and soundbites very similar to desktop apps like Reason or Fruity Loops. editing-functionality is reduced to the basics: clips are looped and automatically beat-matched on up to eight tracks which can only be adjusted in volume and panning (no effects or EQ). changing the BPM-rate requires the sequencer to take a break resynching the tracks, signatures aside the omnipresent 4/4 aren’t supported. users can record new samples directly into the flash-application by using a microphone.

while the sequencer itself isn’t much more than a very impressive demo of flash’s multimedia-capabilities, Splice emphasizes on community-features. users offer their creations for being remixed by others and share samples among each other - all that under Creative Commons-licensing. besides 1.000’s of user-created clips & songs, Splice integrates the CC-based audio-database created by the freesoundproject.