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TJ wrote about Virb yesterday so I will not go into the details about what this service is. I’m not a ’social networker’ persay - never done the MySpace/Facebook thing.
But I wanted to check this out to see how they presented the data and how they mashed up other social networks into their package. In doing this I found a campaign Virb is launching to get people to switch camps.
“Ok. So you want to leave Myspace, but you want to do it in style.” Well if you do want to, check out their Leave My Space site.
After briefly viewing the comments it doesn’t appear the campaign is going great. It seems to me the switching costs are too high in the social networking area. The costs are the friends and data you have accumulated. My guess - Virb will peak very soon and then sent to the web 2.0 graveyard.
Tags: Virb
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8 Responses
tjmapes
March 9th, 2007 at 11:41 am
1I was going to post about this exact same thing. Pretty Ballzy. But I give them credit and hope they succeed. I doubt they will.
Mostly due to the friends everyone has on myspace and the groups, announcements etc.. can’t carry those over.
Anon
March 9th, 2007 at 6:00 pm
2That profile has been taken down. It was a custom profile and was not affiliated with VIRB in any way.
J Phill
March 10th, 2007 at 8:32 am
3I think some forget that not everyone is a designer, therefore the visual presentation pitch only goes so far. It seems like there would be too big a learning curve for customizing pages for non-designers who migrated from MySpace.
Brett Terpstra
March 11th, 2007 at 11:34 am
4Virb makes it extremely easy to start with a page that kicks the living shit out of the design of ANY myspace page ever made. They use tables, their one big fault, but their interface is so sweet and smooth. My point being that all the little kids on myspace may not have the motivation to switch, but VIRB will gain a loyal following of designers and geeks. It already has an active community that I’m really enjoying. Way more than anything I ever found on myspace/facebook. It may never kill myspace, but I don’t think it will perish in the near future.
mrshl
March 11th, 2007 at 5:19 pm
5Virb will, as you say, peak early. But I think their feature set will gradually attract a more demanding and sophisticated set of users. Instead of burning out, I think it’s going to burn slow, gaining a loyal, dedicated set of users over time. They don’t have to conquer the world. They just need a critical mass of users who are willing to grow and maintain the site at a reasonable pace.
Another thing to consider is that Virb is competing with a more than just Myspace. Users of Orkut, Friendster, Bebo, and other smaller networks are going to be even more attracted to Virb, and because those networks are smaller, switching costs are lower.
Andy Brudtkuhl
March 12th, 2007 at 7:41 am
6Thank you all for the great comments.
Brett - The design is far superior and in fact could lead to be a promising differentiation factor for the service.
mrsh - I agree that it’s not just MySpace that Virb is competing with. A couple others could be lumped in to, like last.fm.
The potential for Virb is to be the social mashup not rendering other services obsolete but acting as a personal social aggregator of sorts.
anon
March 16th, 2007 at 6:54 pm
7i gotta say… i visited for about 2 seconds, but i’m already a convert.
Doug
October 28th, 2008 at 7:23 pm
8http://www.trumnation.com
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