In the last months I’ve been trying some social/self-expression Web2.0 services, such as Facebook or LinkedIn. In the last few days I decided to give Virb a try too.

Based on my personal experience, I’m finding Virb a good service to connect with friends, share interests and meet like-minded people.
I mean, I have very little free time to spend using social networks, so I use this kind of tools mostly to connect with people I know or people I’ve worked with, while I’m not particularly interested in online friendship/relationships. Sorry, I’m an old school guy – I prefer obsolete and analogic things like talking face to face or hanging out with real (made of bones and flash) friends.
Also, I’m interested in these services from a technical point of view, as they might be helpful to my job or useful for my clients, so I try to keep myself up-to-date.

So far Virb seems to offer a good platform for self-expression (listing your interests, hobbies, likes, publishing your blogs, your photos or your videos, etc.) and good tools to connect with friends.
It seems to me a more professional service than Facebook – or maybe it is simply less overcrowded than Facebook. Also Virb has a limited set of truly useful tools, while Facebook has potentially every kind of tools, but 90% of them are just a waste of time.

However, the feature that takes Virb on a whole different level is the ability to fully customize your profile design. As you may easily understand, this is a big plus for every designers, artists or professionals who wants to establish a strong presence in social networks. Or it’s simply a powerful way to express yourself through design instead of writing long profiles and listing hundreds of interests.

As soon as I could find some free time, I’d love to customize my Virb page.
I see a good potential in it, being a simple and effective way to collect my blog posts, my Flickr photos, my friends and my bio in one single place for anyone to visit.

Anyway, that’s just my personal opinion after trying it for a few days.
Has anyone else tried Virb? Like it? Hate it? Let me know your thoughts…

Here’s the article’s introduction:

2006 was rich on creative, beautiful and unusual design concepts. We’ve seen a lot of whitespace, many examples of readable and usable text-design, badges, stars, rounded corners, shapes, gradients, mirror and 3D-effects – just name it.

And Jek2k.com is one of the 50, yeah!
Thank you.

In the meanwhile we’re seriously approaching the 100k visits…

———————-
Updated 23.12.2006

I recently found another interesting collection of 2006’s best websites at http://www.flickr.com/photos/splat/sets/981332/, selected by Patrick Haney.

I also got a couple of sites featured in that list!

(Sorry, screenshots are in Italian only)

I have to admit I have not so much time and I’ve tested or used very few Web 2.0 services, but I found Netvibes particularly useful.
I turn on my Mac in the morning, I open my browser and there I have my Netvibes homepage, with all the contents I need at a glance. Having no more than a bunch of minutes to read news and blogs, browsing Css galleries and stuff, Netvibes is a great way to aggregate RSS feeds in a single page, side by side with my local weather forecast, Italian newspaper articles and the good old Google search.

The built-in To-Do lists feature is definitely good and useful as well as the Note tool (when you copy & paste pieces of code…).
The painless integration with other common Web 2.0 services (Flickr, Writely, Del.icio.us and more) and the ability to poll POP and IMAP email accounts (including GMail) make Netvibes also a good substitute of your computer when you’re away or have to do your stuff from a friend’s pc or from an internet café. All you need is an internet connection and your Netvibes login name.

Netvibes also has a nice tabbed UI, available in different themes / colors. And this is defintely a plus. Sometimes Web 2.0 apps mistake minimal UI design for no UI design at all, but this is not the case.

Netvibes is translated in a lot of languages and it’s good to have it in Italian too.

Moreover Netvibes is adding new features week after week. It has a custom API for developers to build new modules and contents for Netvibes.

The Netvibes Ecosystem is a side project aimed to collect publicly available modules and a community for sharing and commenting each other’s content. The Ecosystem is a great source for fresh RSS feeds, podcasts and events calendars, shared and reviewed by other Netvibes members. Each module and each content can be added to your custom homepage with one click.
And it’s growing quickly!

If you wish to read a far more complete review of Netvibes, I recommend this article on Solution Watch. Solution Watch is a must-read website for reviews and previews of Web 2.0 apps.