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:

What is Swurl?

Swurl’s Lifecasting Generates Your Blog For You

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