Opinion BY Armin

Virb is the New Virb

In the Mesozoic era of social networking — that distant year of 2007 — a new community was poised to take over the web, replacing the aging and visually painful MySpace species. Virb allowed users, who joined by invitation only, to craft and customize extremely elegant and sophisticated personal profiles with all the accoutrements of online social behavior. Photos, videos, messages, etc. MySpace died a natural death. Virb, however, was crushed by the imminent rise of Facebook with a nail in the coffin courtesy of Twitter. Acknowledging that they couldn’t compete with Facebook, Virb is re-emerging not as a social tool but as a website-building tool, harnessing the effectiveness of its personalization tools so that photographers can put up a decent portfolio or bands a decent promotional site. The new service also benefits from hosting company Media Temple being the parent company of Virb since 2008. While most companies who didn’t succeed at first would be compelled to change names and launch under a different personality, Virb is betting that its name, in good-standing condition with the web world, can handle the complete switch of service and business model.

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