Social Vibe, recently closed over $4 Million in their series A funding round last month. They are located in Hollywood and have the two things every good web 2.0 start up needs; 1) a slick looking site and 2) a very interesting idea.

The main premise behind their idea is having users of Myspace and Facebook get their social networking pages sponsored and in return they get a chance to win prizes or give money to charities. You get points according to how active you are on a social network, how popular you are, and how many people you get to join the social vibe community. If you think about this for a second you will see that if you have a very active social vibe community it would be very very viral. Also on the plus side they did a good job of making the ads or "sponsorships" cool looking (ie they are not blinking banners for saying you are the 837,487 customer and have won and new laptop), and as a bonus they allow you to donate your points to charity.

I do reserve some questions for their business model the first being; why entries to win a prize? I get offers to enter contests for free all the time, whether it is dropping my business card in the free lunch bowl or the previously mentioned ad for my chance to win a laptop and I know one thing...I don't go near any of them. I realize that here the odds are better, but I do not like working for a chance to win a prize, I think it would be more motivating if this worked in a fashion where you can exchange your points for definitive prizes even if it would take longer to get to the good prizes. Or maybe an even more novel idea just let the people exchange their points for some cool hard cash (although I do realize this could be difficult to implement legally if minors wanted to use the service).

My next bone to pick is with the charities, people love all sorts of charities for different reasons whether it is Save the Whales or Safe Haven for Donkeys in the Holy Land (click the link I did not make that up). The point here is that people like charities for different reasons, I am sure Socialvibe knows exactly how much a point converts to monetarily so why not just let the user donate to whatever charity they desire. However I will admit that they do have a wide range of quality charities covered.

My overall impression here is that this could be huge, everything Social Vibe does looks slick and I could really see people adding these advertisements, widgets, and videos to their social network pages in order to gain a chance at some prizes. Furthermore if this does catch on and people are not as anti-raffle type contests as me the whole scheme is viral enough to spread all over the most popular social networks in no time at all.