Everyone likes to share their thoughts and activities with friends and family, but, narcissists aside, most people don’t have time to spend hours each week blogging about their life. Swurl, a new startup that just launched in public beta, is looking to fix this problem.
Swurl is essentially a lifecasting aggregator that pulls your current activity from web services that include Last.fm, Flickr, Amazon, and nearly twenty other sources (you can see the full list here). The site is reminiscent of Tumblr and FriendFeed, automatically adding a new short post whenever you update one of the aforementioned services, and allowing users to comment on each update.
But CEO Ryan Sit says that Swurl isn’t so much about keeping your friends constantly updated on your current activities (à la Friendfeed). Instead, Swurl is more like an automatically generated blog and scrapbook that you’ve created for your friends and family. It’s a subtle distinction that may not be not be readily apparent, but it’s safe to say that Swurl isn’t just a FriendFeed clone.
As entries get added to Swurl, the site will automatically detect what kind of content it is and “enhance” it accordingly. If you rent a film from Netflix, Swurl will append a link to the movie’s trailer on YouTube. Photos from Flickr will be shown full size in an automatically generated slideshow. You can use the impressive calendar function to visualize when actions have occurred, and there’s also a nifty “infinite scroll” that eliminates the need for a “previous” button – get to the bottom of the page, and the site will automatically load the next few entries without having to refresh.
One of Swurl’s key (and perhaps misunderstood) features is its ability to pull an entire entry, rather than just a snippit, from the services it supports. If you create a blog post, it will be recreated in its in entirety within Swurl – something that won’t appeal to users looking to monetize their blogs. But for the vast majority of internet users, blogs are about sharing thoughts, not making cash. You’ll need proper credentials to add a blog to Swurl in the first place, so content-creators won’t need to worry about having their material swiped.
Swurl joins a number of competitors in the life and activity streaming spaces, which include FriendFeed and Spokeo. And while it does sport some similarities to these services, the site is well done and stands a fair chance at silencing its critics.
Congrats on your public beta launch, Ryan!!
Maybe with this I’ll finally get around to tie all my online activities together in one update stream.
Good to see this write-up. Swurl does not duplicate the entire length of my blog entries, but rather solely the ‘excerpt’ as defined within WordPress. Individuals wishing to avoid content duplication may want to consider using the excerpt option too to avoid this ‘feature.’
I also wrote about Swurl about two weeks ago here: http://www.andy.../what-is-swurl/. Take a look!
It’s exciting to watch this market grow. Thanks for the inside peek. I plan to give it a try too!
@Sarah Thank you! It’s pretty exciting. Thank you for all your help!
@Andy Thanks for pointing that out. If you put in your username/password it imports your entire post so all your stuff is completely in one place. And if you optionally decide not to enter your username/password it just gets your rss feed. Really though, Swurl was designed to be your new blog so having your entire posts imported and not requiring your visitors to click through to view the full post is best, and what we are designing for.
@All, Let us know if you have any feedback and suggestions. We are eager to hear what people are looking for from Swurl and how we could make things better.
Sorry, I am retarded today. Apparently my brain knows it is vaca time. So,
Swurl takes my blog from my wordpress (blog platform) install and places it elsewhere (”Swurl was designed to be your new blog”)?
Nice UI/UX, but it isn’t really tractable, and I am wi/o suggestions on your compelling advantage over something like Blogger.
There simply is no revenue model imaginable other than adverts and subscription. All these folks with dev-chops need to find deal closers that know how to develop biz relationships to an advantage. Let us know when you post the ” postmortem”, I will check it out.
Love the “scrapbook” idea. I’d like to see it implement more features from the sites (correct me if I’m wrong) – i.e. “Notes” posted in Facebook, comments in YouTube, etc. This is great for wanna-be bloggers who don’t really want to dedicate time to a new site.
Also, the videos that aren’t mine I’m seeing from YouTube on there seem to be listed by the date they were added to the site, not when I favorited them (not sure if this is possible).
Finally, I’m just a little concerned about privacy… are there plans to implement any privacy features?
It was only a matter of time for someone to come up with a site called SwURL
I signed up for Swurl and I already made it my default browser page. The timeline is killer. It’s true, if you want blog hits it may be a problem, but you can simply not ad it to your Swurl account. It goes all the way back to 2005 for me, which is when I started del.icio.us and my first listed service. Also, the timeline graphic is so good looking. Today, I love this.
I agree that the timeline feature is creative and useful. I also like the livesearch capability. Swurl has potential as a simple aggregation and publication tool — however, currently with a limited functionality.
I’ve been using swurl.com since I met Ryan earlier this year. It’s a beautifully simple system that does a great job creating a instant history of actions as opposed to just being another social aggregator. I think the comments system has been under-looked as it’s a pretty slick concept. I think it could be built out of bit more, giving us notifications when we get comments on our items and perhaps showing a view of all your comments on other people’s items.
I’ll be using Swurl as a visual reference of how productive I have been. I wrote about it here http://cloudout...08/06/28/swurl/
Painless setup. Simple if sparse design features. Agreed that the timeline is killer. Comment field may be missed by visitors who don’t hover over the post, however. And YouTube’s feed, at least on my new site — http://kawika.swurl.com — offers only one video, http://www.yout...h?v=AAAAAAAAAAA, which is an error. Promising start, regardless.
Sweet use of the LyricWiki API… I totally approve B-)
Here is another service very much like swurl: http://www.minmio.com/
Swurl is now shut down as of Mar 2, 2009