Other panels of interest as Accessible Rich Media and Hey! People with disabilities vote too! (which will most likely cover making social media accessible)
The panel picker closes on September 21 2007. So make sure you vote!

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Kathy’s writings has inspired and touched many in the web community. Her insight has earned her a strong readership. Definitely a sad commentary on where we are as a society.

On the surface Virb is similar to Myspace with the ability to edit your profile, manage friends/groups and customize the look of your profile page. When you look at the sites however the difference is striking. Even in its current somewhat incomplete state Virb is light years ahead of MySpace in terms of usability, interface, features and customization ability. Virb is hot and the difference is clear, just check out the following screenshot comparisons of Virb and MySpace:

Better Homepage

To say the MySpace homepage/dashboard is non-intuitive is an understatement. Besides being overcrowded with Ads, the MySpace homepage just isn’t easy or fun to use. Virb offers updates from friends, a clear view of friendship requests and new messages (without scrolling) and a brief view of profile stats.

Profiles can truly be customized

My least favorite activity on Myspace is attempting to customize profiles. It’s difficult and very inflexible. A lot of people have told me that Myspace users don’t really care about how their profile looks, that why it’s so popular. I have a different theory. I think that users realize that they can choose between a crappy default look or a crappy third party template, but want to be there with there friends so they put up with it. Ultimately you end up with a God awful nearly unreadable page. Virb changes this by making profile pages very flexible and easy to customize. Users have access to a drag and drop interface that lets them move “modules” around on their profile and a simple editor for changing the color scheme of their profile. For users that want more power the advanced editor lets you create attractive custom profile pages using CSS. This advanced editing feature will probably be used by Virb users with experience modifying CSS at first but its still a great feature.

VirbTunes

Music is always a great way to bring people together and Virb takes this to another level by allowing users to share ta list of the music they are listening to and create playlists that will be displayed on their profile home page. One really cool feature Virb has included is called VirbTunes. VirbTunes is a iTunes plugin that pulls information like your most frequently played songs, artists, and more, and displays that information on your Virb profile for everyone to see.

Myspace is well entrenched in the minds of most Americans as “the” social network. But let’s face it, Myspace hasn’t really innovated all that much over the years and right now a lot of things are happening with Myspace that are turning off its users. Don’t take my word for it, I was interested to see what other people thought so I conducted a informal survey to get the opinions of others. Here are some of the things that have impressed the early Virb users:

It’s faster, more useful, more controllable. Also has a higher class member base (as of now), useful groups and music tools.

Easy customization process, much easier to keep tabs on friends when they update anything!

Despite the better code and sexier, cleaner design. I chose Virb because it makes things simple and gives the advanced users some freedom. In myspace everything takes a dozen clicks, a dozen screens and a bundle of frustration to complete. In Virb everything takes one or two clicks - and it’s fun!

Virb is a lot easier to use. The homepage actually makes sense and half the screen isn’t taken up by ads.

Overall design is cleaner - “Like MySpace designed by Apple.”

With the ability to pull in your Flickr photos and the ability to pull your blog’s RSS feed into your profile coming soon Virb is going to be a powerful social tool. Add to that the ability to create pretty much any custom module you want - including pulling in data from Twitter and Imeem and Virb could be all you need to keep your friends up to date on what you are doing. - This one is mine.

A Little Reality

Despite all the love that Virb is getting there is still one major obstacle that it will need to overcome. People are comfortable with Myspace and most have LOTS of friends who may not be as willing to switch to a new service after having investing so much time in building their Myspace profile. Then there is the profile customization issue. Clearly Virb has very powerful customization features. The problem is most people won’t know how to use CSS that well, so until there are a large number of easy to find Virb layouts that users can copy and paste Virb growth will be slower than it could be.

Last, the number one complaint I have heard from beta testers and public users in that there are too many incomplete pages.

Will Virb kill MySpace. Most likely not, but this will be fun to watch.

We also talked about his background in music, leaving CNET and some of the pitfalls of starting Automattic. The full interview will be broadcast on the show in the next week or so. I’ll be sure to announce it when it is ready.