andrewteman.org

I have had a few close friends point me to Virb.com over the past week or so, and I finally clicked on the link to at least see what the fuss was all about. Not surprisingly, it was about nothing at all. It was a bunch of indie twits putting their indie panties in an indie bunch over a new social network, because someone told them it was cool.

It is not.

Of course, it is hailed as a MySpace killer but isn’t everything these days?

With all of these new “social networks” you need to ask “What is the differentiator?” or “What can I get with [Virb] that I don’t already have someplace else?”. The answer appears to be nothing at all. In fact, take a look at a snippet from Virb.com’s “about us” page.

Virb is a community website that combines social interaction with music and entertainment exploration. It’s a great way to keep in touch and meet people with similar interests. Use Virb to discover music, videos, cool companies and organizations… then share what you find with your friends.

Sound familiar? Of course it does. It is every single social network’s “about us” page ever.

I think I am just hitting the wall here, and suffering from network overload. As I do my best to unsubscribe from every useless email newsletter I am on, and every RSS feed I don’t read regularly, I am resisting the knee-jerk reactionary move that is signing up for every friggin social network that comes across my desk - and there are a lot of them.

Read Techcrunch or Mashable for just a few days and your head will be spinning when you realize how many inane networks pop up every day, each more useless and uncreative than the last. There is NO creativity here anymore. These sites and these companies are just rubber stamping the same network concept that has been done 10,000 times over already and trying to sell advertising through it in uncreative ways. Its over saturation of the same crap. Its just hard to care anymore.

And if this over saturation of ACTUAL sites wasn’t enough, enter Ning.com, which basically takes the barrier to entry in creating your own network and obliterates it all together with it’s turnkey network tools. Want to create a network for people in south east Idaho that collect buffalo nickels? Go ahead, ning is for you.

I can see value in *some* of these networks if they satisfy a specific enough niche to be interesting, and appeal to a broad enough audience to be active, or if they have some killer app that we haven’t seen before…but Virb (and many many others) appear to do none of the above.