After first logging into my new Virb account, I was elated to see it was cleanly designed and easily extensible. However, one thing in particular irritates me: the way VirbTunes is handled.

As far as I can tell, VirbTunes is designed to be similar to Last.fm. I know this site is coming from the creators of purevolume, but I still don't understand why they didn't try to work with the Last.fm team to integrate some features. VirbTunes only works with iTunes, Last.fm works with WMP/Winamp/Foobar/XMMS/Amarok/Banshee/Exaile/etc... all of which I have used at one point in time or another; I have never been an iTunes user. I split my computing time between Linux and Windows and iTunes isn't the best player on either system.

The ability to pull in recent tracks from the feeds last.fm provides would be nice. I know last.fm offers its own chart-generating capabilities, but (1) users have to figure this out for themselves instead of the simple integration provided by the Flickr module and (2) this pulls in a graphic which can't be modified by CSS. Some of the last.fm graphics aren't bad, but most are atrocious so I think most users would prefer to be able to style this with CSS (or at least have their default CSS style apply to the list).

Anyway, there's my almost-rant. Last.fm and Virb should work together. They both don't suck, which is more than I can say for most socially-oriented new media companies.

Oh, and hi! I like Virb.