Swurl, a San Diego-based startup, offers a very smart aggregation of all your favorite services that makeup your social footprint online. Swurl is a place to bring all the things you do online together to share in a blog-like format.
While there are a number services that do similar things but I found Swurl's unique experience worth writing about. I have been using Tumblr (for https://fjgruber.com) with a similar mission in mind but I think Swurl might add a little more value by offering special treatment to the various types of content. Since Swurl aggregates Tumblr content I can use both Swurl and Tumblr at the same time.
After inputing all your various sites and services Swurl's secret sauce is in the way it handles content. For example, Swurl recognizes Flickr as photos and serves up a slick inline slideshow that flows through the photos and creates a linkable location. Swurl also enhances data, adding trailers to movies data you rented from Netflix and lyrics to songs bookmarked. Similar to FriendFeed and unlike Tumblr users can add comments to any content item aggregated into a Swurl page.
Swurl creates a "Friends" tab which pulls in contacts from your other social accounts like Flickr, Twitter, Delicious and makes assumptions on friends from other accounts. It creates a lifestream of all your friends activities with the ability to interact directly with the some related social sites like Twitter with @replies. Friends social accounts are exposed and can be viewed directly and friends can be muted from the lifestream making it easier to control lifestream updates. Swurl also indexes all updates which means it offers live search of social content on a specific site.
I created a SOMEWHAT FRANK on Swurl which looks like a scrapbook of all my online activities since 2004. Check out the SOMEWHAT FRANK timeline which is similar to that of a Tumblr archive. Give Swurl a try and leave your SOMEWHAT FRANK opinion on Swurl in the comments below.
