I just finished working on my new website.
There is a screenshot below. It’s made using Indexhibit.
You can visit it at www.ethanbodnar.com

Back in the day when I first got word that the great folks behind Purevolume were coming out with a social network I got excited. Well, Virb finally came out and I never really got involved that much in it. I use it to discover some great musicians and band, but other than that, I don’t use it that much. Facebook is where all of my friends are at, even the bloggers who appear in my feed reader every day are on Facebook now. But, I recently went back and logged into my account at Virb and started fooling around. This is what I found and what I would like to see in the future.

The way I see it Virb is a different kind of social network. It is one for people who like to make things look good and use things that look good. For the artists who like a good looking social network. I saw somewhere someone call it the “designers version of Myspace. Just because all of my friends aren’t on Virb doesn’t mean that there is no value for me. I can use it to connect with artists, musicians, bloggers, and more.

So far, Virb has gotten some things right. They allow you to integrate Flickr, added widescreen video, made easy to track what music you are listening to with VirbTunes, and more. Furthermore, the way the allow you to customize your profile is very well done along with the ability to turn customization off. Some people have done a really nice job customizing their profiles.

But I do have some suggestion for it and from what I have heard the Virb team is busy working on improving Virb as we talk. Here is what I would like to see at Virb in the coming months.

-More integration from other web applications and communities like they did with Flickr.
-It takes too many clicks to view your friends profile.
-Some beautiful custom CSS themes for those non programmers among us.
-That Google advertisement at the bottom is huge. I am guessing they just put that there temporarily until they figured out their advertising strategy, at least I hope so. I think that they have a huge opportunity to develop there own non-intrusive advertising platform. They could allow ads to be targeted based on profile information.
-The Virb Blog is a little lacking. I think they could blog a lot more. But maybe that’s just me.
-They still have yet to add the “Virb is…” section. When they do this it could be huge. Allowing the users to find content and other people through this could be great.
-Since a lot of people on Virb are of the creative type, I think they could add a feature for Projects where people could highlight what they are working on in the profile and in the “Virb is…”section. This way others could offer feedback and people could share their projects.

That is all I have to say. I see an awesome future for Virb!

Check out my Virb profile here. (still being worked on)
Check out the blog by the company who makes Virb called The Big Noob.
Check out what other people are saying at Joshua Blankenship’s blog where he asks for feedback on Virb.

There has been a lot of talk about Twitter versus Pownce. So I thought I would present my take on the whole thing. I am not going to give you a review of each and tell you which one is better. Instead, I thought I would use this opportunity to have a conversation about where this is all going and what it means for the future of social media, blogging, and online communications.

I think we are going to see a lot more people starting to streaming their lives. This is made up of two concepts.

Online Activity:
Allow people to create a stream of all of their online activities by using the RSS feeds from web applications.

Offline Activity:
Have people post updates on what is going on in their lifes. This can mostly be compared to Pownce and Twitter.

We need a solution that would accommodate this concept, allow us to have a network of friends, and create/view content in multiple ways. I think that Twitter should re-design their site, keep their simplicity, and add the concept of an online activity stream.

I think that we are going to see people move away from blogging toward a model like this. No, I don’t think blogs will start disappearing, the people that have a good audience and those who write longer posts will be sure to continue. But the average blogger will start streaming their life and writing short posts. They will focus more on the conversation. They will share ideas in small form factors. They will create concrete networks of people around them based on what everybody is doing online and off.

(I am aware that there is already services out there that do some of this stuff. But it hasn’t been perfected and there are problems with them)

For now here is my story of how I came to be on Twitter and Pownce…

About a month ago I decided it was about time to sign up for Twitter, the ever so popular service that allow people to share updates of their life with people. In the past week I really started getting into it and found many people whose blogs I read, who I have collaborated with, or met at conferences already on Twitter.

Then along came Pownce. I got an invite and tried the service out. The main difference between Twitter is that Pownce adds file/event sharing and is a better design. Though design is not the main thing people care about in this case, for a service like this it is all about functionality.

So, I have set up accounts at both places but for the most part I will only update Twitter. I have already found a good amount of people who I want to follow on Twitter and don’t feel like finding them again. If I want to share files with my friends I will just use a file sharing web application. Twitter is simple and doesn’t make it complicated. Twitter has an API and from that has come some wonderful apps that were made by the community. And lastly, Twitter has mobile updates which seals the deal. Twitter is for me.

Check out coverage from some other people…

Brian Benzinger at Solution Watch gives his impressions of Pownce.
Nik Cubrilovic writes about the importance of Twitter’s API.
Glenn Wolsey gives a good overview of what Pownce is all about.

Check me out and add me on Twitter and Pownce.
I have several invites left for Pownce. Leave me an email if you would like them.