The RSPB required a web application through which they could provide learning material to people interested in birds and birdwatching. Once a user has logged-in they are presented with 6 different modules as well as access to the resource library which contains the RPSB Handbook of British Birds and Where to Watch Birds - Britain.
After Jonny mentioned Virb being the next Myspace in response to one of my earlier articles I decided to take a more in-depth look at the social networking site.
At first my experience with Virb was short-lived. I signed up to Facebook around roughly the same time and I was frustrated by the fact I couldn’t accumulate the same number of friends on Virb due to the lack of people I know who have accounts on the social networking site. However I have stuck at it and have gained a number of friends through similar interests and music.
I like to think of Virb as Facebook with a music aspect, or Last.fm with a stronger social networking aspect. Or even Myspace with a better design and feature list. A big feature at the moment within social networking sites is to be able to customise your own profile. This is limited in Facebook to only being able to drag and drop certain content blocks in predetermined positions. Last.fm customisations are limited to two colour themes, Simply Red and Paint It Black, and though Myspace offers a large amount of customisation, it is done in an unintuitive way and you need a certain degree of technical know-how to produce anything decent. Oh, and I forgot to mention, Myspace uses tables for layout. Tut tut.
Virb makes it really easy to customise your profile, you can select Basic Styles to simply change the default fonts, background colours and border colours; you could select the Basic Layout option which is very similar to the Facebook customisation of drag and dropping content blocks or if you are fairly tech-savvy you can plump for the Advanced customisation option. Here you can define your own CSS and HTML layout. Similarly to Myspace, you are not permitted to insert any Javascript code which I expect will be in place to prevent any security exploits. There are already a large number of groups that have been setup to help people with customising their profiles and there are also invite-only groups for people with outstanding profile customisations. My current favourite is Rob Morris’ Digital Mash.
Further features within Virb allow you to import Flickr photos, import an external blog or create your own, upload photos and videos, and of course being able to add friends. Virb have also released VirbTunes, a plugin for iTunes that sends information to your Virb account such as current track playing, most listened to artists etc. in a similar fashion that the Last.fm client application works. It would have been nice for Virb and Last.fm to play together on this one instead of needing to install the applications for both of them.
I have been on Virb for roughly a month now I think, and one thing that I have noticed is that the general user-base for Virb consists of creative professionals; musicians, web designers/developers, graphic designers, artists etc. In comparison to Facebook and Myspace users whose backgrounds, age-range and professions are quite diverse.
My next step on Virb is to customise my profile into something decent.
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