Is Virb's honeymoon with users coming to an end?

This post attacking Virb raises a number of stinging, and I think legitimate, criticisms of the nascent, would-be Myspace killer. In his post titled "10 Reasons virb sucks big time," Michael Kamleitner gives voice to a number of misgivings I've had myself:

• virb is not open - in fact it’s way more sealed up than Myspace ever was. virb currently supports external flash-content from YouTube, Google and a few other approved popular service only. compare that to the widget-ecosystem which has emerged around Myspace for the past 2 years. bidirectional content syndication from and to social networks might turn out crucial. it will be exciting to see Myspace’ anticipated/dreaded policy shifts in 2007.
• virb is hard to syndicate - I haven’t found a single RSS-feed yet. not even on my personal blog (c’Mon, even myspace offers RSS-feeds, though without full content)
• virb ain’t valid - agreed, virb’s code is lightyears ahead of Myspace’s, but does it validate against current web-standards? not really.
• virb is poorly communicating itself - I was suprised that virb isn’t using the merits of blogging to communicate with its userbase.
• virb is a silo - there is currently no way (i.e. API) to get data out of a virb-account (except of course by content-scraping). since social networking is almost commoditized (check People Aggregator or Ning) by now, and most users have realized they want to be part of numerous networks instead of one monolithic, this is probably a bad move.
• but most of all: virb is a lonely place (currently only 35 users based in Austria). sure, it’s kinda unfair to compare a service just started with Myspace’ community of +100mio users. but in the end, size-of-community is exactly the key-feature of any closed down, centralized social network as is virb or Myspace.

        (ok, that was only 7 issues, sorry for cheating on the headline )

Excepting the ridiculous criticism of Virb's small size, I think some of these criticisms are dead on, and I love Virb. The two biggies for me are the lack of support for additional "approved" flash services & the lack of communication with users. Yes, Flash widgets have their security issues, but Virb has been less than proactive about approving additional sources, and most widgets in wide use on Myspace (e.g., Twitter, Slide) are safe as milk. A cynical user might wonder whether Virb is just worried about cannibalizing their own offerings. For example, how likely are they to approve Last.fm widgets, when Virb offers their own competing feature. Their reluctance is not entirely unsurprising, but Virb isn't going to compete with Myspace by offering less flexibility.

Much of the skepticism might be alleviated if Virb had a conventional beta blog that addressed user questions regarding upcoming functionality. There is a group on Virb that solicits user feedback, but I've seen nary on official Virbster writing in response. Communication with users of a new service is paramount if you want to retain their tenuous loyalty. As big a Virb fan as I am, I still think Facebook is better, offering more useful features and excellent communication with readers.

Okay, but does Virb really suck? Nah. This list of features literally counts the ways in which the site is better than Myspace. And Virb is still new enough that users are willing to give them a pass while they roll out additional features and functionality. But they need to be careful not to spoil the honeymoon.

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EDIT: Turns out Virb does have a group for its developers. But they're not really using it to talk about what's happening at Virb. Actually, they're not using it at all.