So here they are – 10 solid reasons why I (and many, many others) believe VIRB° is going to give MySpace a damn good run for it’s money in the coming 12 months.

1. Clean, Intuitive, Unobtrusive Layout

The most striking thing about VIRB° is it’s clean content and navigational layout. There’s equal, if not more (definitely for those who know their way around HTML and CSS coding), customisation options for personalising how your own page should look. And if, like me, you find nothing more annoying than some people’s penchant for glitter graphics and downright visually offensive backgrounds, you have the option of turning off customisation (VIEW SCREENCAST) on ANYONE’s page at any time.

Brilliant!

Here’s a taste of some of the amazing profile designs that are popping up throughout the site:

• Aussie Rob Morris
• US Indie Band – Tifah
• UK Designer – Leevi Graham

PS. Coming soon everyone will have the option of being able to save multiple profile designs/layouts that will be able to be switched through at will. Create your own special Xmas design that you can switch to each year. Again… Brilliant!

2. Import Blog Entries

Blogging is by all accounts the new fad in the online world and every “membership” site out there these days seems to have a blogging feature either already built into the service (eg. MySpace, Facebook, MSN LIVE Spaces etc) or there’s plans for one in the near future.

Everything is fine and dandy if you only use one of these sites and therefore only have to transfer your thoughts and other mindless dribble to your keyboards the one time only. But what if you want to add your Blog entries to a number of sites… without having to copy and paste a gazillion times over? This is where RSS feeds come in handy and where the good folk at VIRB° have once again taken into consideration the online habits of their users and made things super easy.

Most Blog applications (WordPress, Typepad, Live Journal, Blogger and even MySpace *spit*) have RSS feeds automatically built into the service making it easy to transport your content to other sites that support the import of such data. Forward thinking social networking sites like Facebook and now VIRB° have recognised the need for Blog importing via and RSS feeds and “voila” just like that, yet another reason why MySpace is being left behind.

Check out this great little screencast and you’ll see what I’m talking about. It’s so easy to do!

3. Virbtunes

One of my ABSOLUTE favourite bits of VIRB° is their “Virbtunes” feature. Just like in MSN Messenger where you can share the names of the musical tracks you are listening to in iTunes or Winamp at any one time with your friends, by downloading and installing a small add-on piece of software to your iTunes, VIRB° will keep a full history of the tunes you are listening to and provide you with a number of ways you can share the information with your friends. For example, you can add modules to your homepage to display the most recent songs you have listened to, your all-time most listened to artists and more.

And don’t worry if you let a Billy Ray Cyrus track slip through accidentally, you have the option of getting into your playlist history on your VIRB° account and deleting whatever you don’t want your friends to see.

Finally, with the all new “VIRB° Transport” feature (see below), you can now share your playlists ANYWHERE on the net with a little snippit of code you can pick up from your VIRB° Transport page. Once again it’s OH-SO-EASY to do and will allow you to share information like your most recently listened to tracks (in real time).

To learn more about this awesome feature, check out the “Virbtunes” page under “Music” once you have created your profile.

4. Flickr Integration

Just like like Blog features, most social networking sites have some kind of photo album feature built in. This is great, but once again uploading, tagging, captioning and grouping your images 5 different times on 5 different sites (for example) is way too time consuming. And why try to reinvent the wheel anyway? Flickr is easily recognised as the best photo sharing site out there and it has the added benefit of cleverly allowing you to share your Flickr data with other web applications. Surprise, surprise, the guys at VIRB° have recognised the need for a Flickr integration feature to enable people out there to manage their images ONE TIME on Flickr and magically have the results automatically reflected on your VIRB° profile.

Check out this great Flickr integration screencast to see just how easily this is achieved.

5. Widescreen Videos / Lights Out

It’d be pretty hard for ANY site to match YouTube in the video sharing department. So the clever peeps at VIRB° give you a couple of great features to make your video sharing experiences on VIRB° just that little bit different… just that little bit better. For starters you get the option of widescreen videos! Everything’s better in widescreen… let’s face it! And watching your favourite movies is always better in the dark right? Well what do you know… VIRB° gives you the option to “turn out the lights”.

All is explained in this “lights-out” screencast.

6. VIRB° Transport

As far as I’m concerned, this is the grand daddy of all the MySpace killing features on VIRB°. Imagine being able to feature modules from your VIRB° profile on any site on the Internet where you can paste small snippets of HTML? Imagine being able to insert your VIRB° friends list on your personal blog, or create a video portfolio that you can feature anywhere? Well now you can with VIRB° Transport.

For more information, check out the VIRB° Transport screencast.

7. Hugely versatile groups

The full compliment of “Group” features are still being rolled out so I will no doubt be updating this section in the near future, but right now you get the option to start any kind of group, choose how membership is decided (open to everyone, invite only etc) and participate in the nifty thread style “Shoutbox” comments area.

Here’s some examples of groups that I have personally started:

• Brisbane Lions
• Vancouver Canucks
• The Princess Bride
• 300
• O.A.R.

Expanded features for groups are coming soon and I personally can’t wait to see what the lads come up with. I’ll update this section accordingly as soon as the new stuff is rolled out.

8. Recent Activity

The last thing you want to have to do is visit EVERY one of your friends’ pages to see if they have updated anything. Thankfully with VIRB° recent activity of your mates is listed right there on your VIRB° homepage. As soon as anyone posts a new blog entry, adds new photos to their VIRB° photo album (doesn’t yet work with the Flickr import feature) or even videos to their VIRB° collection, you will know straight away.

Try and match that MySpace! What’s that? You can’t? No… I didn’t think so.

9. Edit Friendships

We all do it… add friends who aren’t really friends just because they wrote you a really sweet friend request. But sometimes you don’t want these “quasi-acquaintances” seeing the announcements and recent activity that you would normally reserve for your closest of buddies. No problem.

VIRB° allows you to edit the friendship status’ of anyone you add to your list. Check out this excellent screencast to get a better idea of what I’m banging on about here.

10. All the Small Things…

I could have easily made this “15 Reasons…” but I do actually want to get to sleep tonight and I don’t want to spoil all the exploratory fun for you all. But here’s a few other sweet features you will find along the way:

• The ability to specify your own unique VIRB° URL (eg. http://www.virb.com/masey)
• A really nifty Ajax powered friend search tool on your VIRB° homepage
• Preview music while you are browsing or sifting through friend requests
• Announcements – a quick way of getting a message to all of your friends
• Custom Modules – in case you want to put something in your profile that doesn’t fit anywhere else.

And there’s so many more that you can read about on the very cool “VIRB° New Features” page.

The revolution has already begun people. Long-time MySpacers are deserting the messy, over-commercialised, sleezy, tired site for something new and exciting. It’s called VIRB° and it’s time you got on board.

SIGN UP now and tell all your friends! If it helps, send this Blog post to your friends (click on the “Share this” link up top) and let them decide for themselves. I think I put forward a pretty convincing case!

Oh yeah, and comments (below) and links to this entry are always welcome!

The only way you wouldn’t have heard of “Facebook” by now is if you have had your head buried in the sand… but lucky you if it was on a nice tropical beach somewhere. Yes, it is essentially another of those “social network thingies” just like the grotesque “MySpace” and the new up and comer “VIRB”, but there’s just something about Facebook that sets it apart from the others. A quick “Facebook 101″ courtesy of good old Wikipedia:

Facebook was originally developed for college and university students but has since been made available to anyone with an email address. People may then select to join one or more participating networks, such as a high school, place of employment, or geographic region.

As of February 2007, the website had the largest number of registered users among college-focused sites with over 18 million members worldwide (also from non-collegiate networks).

Facebook is the number one site for photo sharing, ahead of public sites such as Flickr, with over 6 million photos uploaded daily, and is the sixth most visited site in the United States.

In 2006, with the sale of social networking site MySpace to NewsCorp, there has been talk about the possible sale of Facebook to a larger media company. Zuckerberg, the owner of Facebook, has said that he does not want to sell the company and denies rumors to the contrary. He has already outright rejected offers in the range of $975 million, and it is not clear who might be willing to pay a higher premium for the site. Steve Rosenbush, a technology business analyst, suspects Viacom.

In September 2006, serious talks between Facebook and Yahoo took place for the acquisition of the social network, with prices reaching as high as $1 billion. In October, after Google purchased video-sharing site YouTube, rumors circulated that Google had offered $2.3 billion to outbid Yahoo!.

It’s fair to say then, that the site’s pretty popular.

So here’s how my theory goes. Sites like MySpace where you are constantly bombarded by spammers, hackers and wannabe muso desperados, have always been open to anyone which, in my opinion, has resulted in a HUGE membership base that produce some pretty mindless content. Facebook is certainly not immune to the same sort of dribble that I am loosely referring to, but it was developed by a Harvard student for otherUniversity students to use to interact online. Let’s face it, the level of intelligence and therefore intelligent content was there from the get-go.

Privacy controls are far tighter, you aren’t bombarded by mind numbing “bling” graphics and other sensory abusing elements on user profile pages, and as far as I can tell so far, there’s not a single issue with spamming or hacking… yet *touch wood*.

Like Jordan covers in his post, I too have managed to hook up with a whole bunch of people I thought I had lost touch with. It’s been great, and after a year or more of being on Facebook I still don’t ever find myself shaking my head in bewilderment at the random morons who send me “friend requests” out of the blue with no explanation as to who they are or how they found me, just as I did everyday on MySpace.

Anyway enough of my ranting, do one of two things right now… if not both:

1. Go read Jordan’s reliably well written post on the subject. He covers it all beautifully.
2. Sign up at Facebook now and see which former acquaintances you can connect back up with yourself.

Again – apologies for stealing your Blog entry title Jords. At the very least this will give us a bit of an idea who is pulling more weight with Google rankings once both our pages get picked up! Ha!

For those of you who don’t know, “Tom” is the guy who pops up in your friends list as soon as you start up any new MySpace account. He’s like the guy that you get straight off the bat so you don’t feel lonely when you’re getting started.

Recently, Tom was quite vocal about how MySpace security was being tightened to help prevent profile hacking and the practice of “phishing” through fake MySpace login pages. Such practices have increased on MySpace over the past few months putting member security of personal details etc at great risk. The “powers that be” at MySpace recognise the problem, but seem to be somewhat powerless to do anything about it which makes the whole site and it’s security seem a little farcical.

This brings me back to my original point. It seems that even Tom, MySpace’s very own Golden Boy, has now fallen victim to a little profile hacking. This time his bulletin, which appeared around 10am this morning (Vancouver time), linked you through to a blatent phishing site which makes an attempt to gather your login details to use in turn to hack YOUR own account.

I have covered this whole process, including what you can do to protect yourself, in a previous post. The point here though, is to highlight the significance of Tom’s hacked bulletin post. It’s a clear cut display that MySpace is indeed riddled with security problems which clearly not even their own staff members are immune to.

With new competition coming from some exciting startups like VIRB.com which I have high hopes for in 2007, it remains to be seen if the MySpace juggernaut will continue to roll on, or if members like me are going to start looking elsewhere for their online social fix.

There’s a disturbing and annoying new trend that is becoming fairly rampant on MySpace these days, and that trend is Bulletin spamming through profile hacking.

The term “hacking” refers to a certain collection of low-life scum out in cyberspace deceiving you in one way or another, in such a way that you unwittingly give up your email and profile password to them. Once they have your details, they can then log into your account and start posting SPAM bulletin posts from your account with headlines such as the following I have received lately from some of my friends:

• “Funny New Video” or
• “hot new pic/cam related myspace site!” or even something like
• “HOTTEST NEW FREE RINGTONES!”

It’s basically stupid stuff being advertised that you will easily be able to recognise, generally because the content will be VERY out of character in regards to what that “friend” normally posts.

It’s annoying I know… and the only way really to combat the problem is through education – hence why I am writing this to explain to everyone how the hacking can potentially occur, how you can protect yourself from being hacked and what you need to do to stop hackers from accessing your account and using it to spread SPAM bulletins to all your listed friends.

1. How Does Hacking Occur?

NB. I’m not suggesting in any way that this is the ONLY form of profile hacking when it comes to MySpace. I’m just providing information on one of the most common forms in the hope that it will better arm you to combat the attempts.

Ironically, most hacks occur as a result of people viewing bulletin posts that have been posted by one of their “already hacked” friends.

For example, here is a bulletin I received from my friend Cassie just this morning.

Trust me when I say the content of the bulletin “ain’t exactly customary” of Cassie, and therefore is a clear example of a hack attempt and provides a great example to run through and learn from.

If you click on the link featuring in the bulletin, you are taken through to a site that for all intents and purposes appears to be a MySpace login page.

The hook here is that the text “You Must Be Logged-In To Do That!” is presented which, if you’re not careful, will result in you doing just that – entering in your MySpace login email and password. As soon as you hit the Login button, you will indeed be sent through to your MySpace page, but meanwhile your login details are sent to the hackers database ready for them to start using to hack your profile. This method of trickery is also known as “Phishing”.

2. How Can You Prevent Yourself From Being Hacked?

If you look carefully at the MySpace mirror (replication/imitation) site you are linked to (see screen shot right), you will note that the page URL is nothing like what you would see if it was a genuine MySpace page. The “myspace.com” domain doesn’t even feature at all. This is a unmistakable marker that you are in the process of being hacked.

MySpace actually publish a pretty visible warning on their login pages warning you against what I have just mentioned. I have posted the warning here so you can see what I mean by “myspace.com” featuring in the domain/URL and therefore signaling a genuine MySpace page.

For those of you who made the recent upgrade to Firefox 2.0, you should never run into this problem as the browser has an excellent “phishing” warning system built in that will warn you that something is not right about the page you have arrived on.

Here’s an example graphic of how my browser caught the bogus MySpace login page mentioned above before I had any chance of submitting my details.

If you are using crappy old IE 6.0 or something like that, you can better protect yourself by downloading and installing Firefox 2.

3. How To Beat The Hackers

So you’re pretty sure you’ve already fallen victim to a hacker? Well the solution is actually pretty simple.

Without the correct profile login details for you, they can’t access your profile anymore and therefore can’t send out anymore crappy bulletins. All you need to do is get into your Account Settings and:

1. change your password to something new – something contains greater than 6 characters and features a mixture of both letters and numbers.
2. change your password AND the email address you use as your login. This will only be a viable option for those of you who have a secondary address that you regularly use.

Changing all these details around will effectively block the hackers from getting into your account ever again.

Finally, you may not feel that being hacked is that big a deal? Well let me tell you it is! At the moment the hackers may only be accessing your account to post crappy bulletins, but the potential for damage that they could cause using your login is unlimited. Take these possible applications for example:

• Posting pornographic images in your pictures area
• Leaving abusive comments on the profiles of your friends
• Conducting unsavory posting activity within the “Forum” or “Group” areas that could result in your profile being suspended.

Either way, it’s a scary thought, so please be mindful of the information I have presented above. If you got any value out of what you read, please leave me a message below.