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"One of the most highly anticipated services of 2007 has got to be Virb, a social network from Unborn Media, creators of the widely-praised musical social site PureVolume.  Although the founders have been careful to avoid the hype, the testers in the private beta have frequently compared Virb to MySpace, complementing the former on its impressive design and usability.  \nIn short, Virb is what MySpace would be like if it actually worked: a nice design, simple and intuitive navigation and just as much (perhaps even more) customization - not only can you edit all your profile's colors and fonts in the basic view, but advanced users can edit the css and html, as well as building custom modules (basically snippets of html that make it easier to organize the various items on your page).  There's photo sharing too, of course, plus video-sharing, tagging, groups, comments, messaging and all the other standard features.  Coming from the makers of PureVolume, there's also a strong musical element: a download called Virbtunes works like MOG or Last.fm, tracking the music you listen to in iTunes and making recommendations.  And just like on MySpace, bands also have special pages from which you can grab tracks to populate a player on your own profile.\nAs most of the beta testers have pointed out, it's pretty impressive.  There's certainly some ill-will towards MySpace in the design and developer communities, and there's already a buzz generating around the product that's similar to the niche brand-power of 37Signals.  There's clearly no chance that the majority of MySpacers will switch, but the real question is whether Virb can roll out in time before the users go elsewhere.  \nAnother startup that we're hoping will (finally) open its doors in 2007 is the TV downloads service Tioti.  I first wrote about them in late 2005, and while getting access is now as easy as Googling it and looking for the beta URL, Tioti.com is still a holding page.\nPS. I'd also be interested to hear about the startups you think will be social vaporware in 2007 - a lot of the most highly anticipated products at the end of 2005 still don't seem close to launching.\n"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2006/12/27/virb/>