Why?

I’m a member of so many sites now that I can barely keep up with them. I am on Facebook, MySpace and a lot more. I really don’t have time to sign up, post my information, create a blog, customize everything and start a new friends list here. I was on Live Journal for a while, but left it due to rude people and lack of time…plus, I just didn’t like it at all.

I know I’m going to get cyber-tomatoes tossed at me for people thinking I have such an “ugly” MS profile, but it’s one I designed myself and I like it. If you ask me, some of the profile designs here are just as bad if not worse than MS has. It’s a person’s opinion on how pretty something is, and believe me, I’ve had messages from others saying just how cool my profile and blog are. I look at it like this: if you don’t like it, don’t bother to look at it. There are some beautiful profiles / blogs on MS, believe it or not. Yes, there are some ugly ones but those are few and far between.

I do wish all of you the best of luck however. Blessings!

One of the great things about virb is that while the site allows flexibility in styling the user profiles—and opens the door for myspace like trash—you have the option to turn the styles off while browsing. This is a great usability feature.

Great work to the virb team. I’ve already killed more time between classes while at virb that I ever did with myspace. :)

Though I think I may be social networked out. I’ve already deleted my myspace and living fine without a similar site.

Sadly, though, it seems like the certain friends of mine are only reachable via myspace… and it’s always those types that I impossible to get to move. And so now I find myself checking my old myspace and my virb accounts. Almost as much of a time waste as twittering…

Virb does look feature-complete, and stylish to boot, but Facebook has a very large community, initially from HiEd, but now open to the world. Plus, it’s not hideously ugly like MySpace.

Nathan: I like Facebook, but I just don’t use it. It does seem more useful for serious social networking, but serious social networking isn’t really something I do a lot. It’s just cool to have a space (outside your own site) which you can customize to the extent Virb lets you without putting up with the crap MySpace imposes on you.

I wish Virb good luck – but equally I wish good luck for any such site that manages to unseat MySpace and replace it with something tasteful.

I feel your pain when it comes to poorly designed sites, Mike. If only you could design every site, we’d all be in better hands. But all of the adolecent, pimple-faced, kids who use MySpace probably love sparkly backgrounds and horrid layouts. They want their “space” to mirror their bedrooms. This is an audience who puts stickers on their laptops and draws on their shoes with ink. “Like, cool!”

As long as we’re talking about sites with cluttered designs, we might as well bring up Amazon and eBay. They look like they were designed in 1992 using Notepad. Classic examples of “band-aid” design. “Hey, let’s sell books! Just slap another tab in the header.”