I signed up for Virb today, and so far I am very impressed. The interface is clean and intuitive, and I had a slick looking profile created (with music) in about fifteen minutes. I also like the fact that their terms state that you your agreement with them terminates when you cancel your account. Many other sites like to try and retain the right to distribute your music even after you might cancel.

Sign-up was painless, and they even allowed me to customize my entire profile before I verified my email address. The only quirk was that they inserted my address based on my zip code, and I had to correct the name of the town later.

Uploading music requires that you first create an album for it to be listed under, which may require a little bit of creativity for digital singles. Adding the tracklisting can be time consuming, since the tracks are added one at a time. But this also allows you to insert the lyrics for each track as you add them. The site gets a bit quirky at times, and sometimes hangs. I think this has to do with the page refreshes that are being triggered via java (maybe jquery). It didn't happen often enough to bother me, though.

When it comes to your profile, you get lots of freedom to change the appearance and layout, including the ability to add custom modules from popular video sharing sites like YouTube. Like Myspace, you can have Virb email you when you receive new friend requests and comments, and you can set them to be auto-approved. The musicplayer is light years ahead of Myspace in both style and quality. I'm not positive what bitrates they allow for MP3 uploads, but I added mine at 192kbps without any errors.

My favorite feature at Virb, though, has to be the blog import feature. We finally have a social networking site that understands that we don't feel like posting duplicate content to every single site that we have a profile on. And no matter how many "friends" we have attached to our profile, I am not going to use my blog at myspace or some other social networking site as my "official" blog. It is about time somebody figured this out. All you need to do is add the RSS feed URL from your main artist blog, and it will include posts from your official feed on your Virb profile. Awesome. Let's just hope Google doesn't penalize my official blog for duplicate content!