Swurl – somewhere between FriendFeed and Tumblr
I’ve created an account on Swurl to see what it’s all about.
I apologize in advance, this isn’t one of those organized and professional reviews, it’s a collection of thoughts.
Things I like:
- Automatically imports your Friends from other services IF they already use Swurl (or so I think)
- Invite friends automatically pulls up your E-Mail editor (MS Outlook in my case) with a preformatted E-Mail message, including your Swurl URL.
- Home page: SNAP (?) integration to pull up a screen shot of the link in question is cool
- Twitter graphics to differentiate from other services = cool
- The Timeline function (see above) shows your activity in a crisp format. Year selection is an interesting idea for limiting what appears onscreen; how about Month too?
- Comments and conversation functions: you manually type in your name (why?) and your message; need to see how it would handle longer, multi-person conversations – I expect FriendFeed is better at this.
- Cross between FriendFeed (building entries via RSS feeds) and Tumblr (which requires you to add all of the links yourself)
Things I don’t like:
- Can’t manually add links, must add through other services (e.g. Digg, Delicious, etc.)
- Services supported: more than Social Thing, fewer than FriendFeed; doesn’t include Pownce or Jaiku?
- FriendFeed entries didn’t show up 15 minutes after they were added in FriendFeed; maybe they’re still building this feature?
- Timeline: you don’t see the original service where your feed entry came from – everything is branded with your Swurl url; you see a Status or Link description onscreen, that’s all.
- Friending: someone is automatically your Friend when they add you; you have to chose to deFriend if you don’t want to follow them (this is a quibble, it’s not necessarily a big deal)
- Livesearch function: what am I getting in the search results: my feed or my Friends Feeds?
The bottom line:
The articles that I’ve read about Swurl indicate that it’s designed as a kind of self-updating scrapbook of your online activity. What I’ve seen so far seems to support that argument, which is good.
Swurl could be a clean way to build up an online portfolio activity for professional purposes. The automation gives it an advantage over Tumblr, where everything must be bookmarked to appear in your tumblelog.
HOWEVER, the inability to manually include entries, which I couldn’t find, would be really nice to have, particularly if you want to do additional annotation or break up the flow with descriptions.
This application won’t replace Twitter, FriendFeed (which I originally thought of), or Tumblr either. However, I predict that it will find its own audience because of the clean design and automation.
Other Resources:
Swurl’s Lifecasting Generates Your Blog For You
Andy DeSoto:
I agree with your observations, enjoyed reading. One comment to make is that the commenting system is surprisingly relatively vibrant– even though, right, it is no FriendFeed there, it eliminates the bells and whistles yet keeps a pretty solid functionality. Leave a comment on one of my items (andy.swurl.com) maybe and we can play around. Plus the AIM integration is nice too (although it doesn't facilitate direct replies).
Good point about the name thing, though.
28 June 2008, 10:06 amPhil Glockner:
Swurl is a pure aggregator and has no ways of adding content directly. It's a weird restriction but makes sense if you realize it wants to organize all your other stuff.
If you want to add something from the internets manually to swurl, add friendfeed to swurl and then use the friendfeed bookmarklet, or add a tumblr account and add something using the tumblr bookmarklet.
btw following you on swurl. mine is eng1ne.swurl.com
28 June 2008, 11:59 ammrshl:
Tumblr imports feeds, too. Although they have a soft maximum limit of five (you can ask for more).
28 June 2008, 12:23 pmMark Dykeman:
@Andy – will do. I'm following you now on Swurl and I'll try commenting on your stuff.
@J. Phil – following you there, too. BTW, it seems like there's a delay in seeing FriendFeed stuff appear at Swurl.
@mrshl – D'OH – didn't realize that you could import RSS feeds into Tumblr, must check out.
28 June 2008, 12:34 pmRyan:
Hello, thanks for writing an awesome review on Swurl! Thank you for pointing out the things you like. To answer some of your dislikes:
- Right now we are focused on bringing your content and not creating it on our own system. For now we think you should save all your links on delicious and all your photos on flickr, they are the best services for that. We may allow people do blog directly on Swurl in the future.
- We will be adding a ton more really cool services as soon as we can.
- We are still working on the FriendFeed data source, right now it just brings in your FriendFeed friends
- The timeline is trying to be a list of all your stuff on Swurl. We don't put a link to the data source there because we really don't have much space.
- We automatically create some friends for you based on your friend lists on your data sources, we don't auto follow if someone follows you
- In the live search you only get your stuff, we will try to include your friends stuff possibly later
Feel free to email me at any time,
1 July 2008, 11:18 amRyan at Swurl
Mark Dykeman:
Ryan, thank you for checking out my Swurl review, I may be in touch with you with an idea or two.
1 July 2008, 2:17 pmCasual.info.in.a.bottle » Blog Archive » Prime prove con Swurl: tra FriendFeed e Tumblr…:
[...] inglese -> Swurl: Your Lifestream, Made Beautiful -> Hands on: Swurl aggregates your web life -> Swurl – somewhere between FriendFeed and Tumblr -> Swurl – scrapbook your digital life in italiano -> Vita Digitale: swurl.com Timeline -> Swurl: [...]
16 July 2008, 6:24 am