'¦With a Swurl on Top

David Heath
Wednesday, 09 July 2008 09:30

Business IT - Networking

You have a blog, you Twitter, there are endless photos on Flickr and Picasa; there are even frequent uploads on YouTube.  You're known on all of them by different names – how can you possibly keep all your family and friends aware of these places?  Enter Swurl.

Swurl is not the first such aggregation service – there’s Friendfeed and also Red Hat has Mugshot (is it just me, or does their logo look an awful lot like Wilson!).  However, Swurl seems to be getting all the attention. 

Theirs is a very smooth interface – one of the most interesting features is the timeline.  As content is brought together from all your identified sources, in-situ date-stamps are used to place everything in context.  For instance, I added a couple of pictures of my kids to a Picasa album.  One of them was correctly placed (as the camera date stamp was still attached to the picture) the others picked up the date they were last edited  Even though, the time-line is still roughly established.

This content was interspersed with my blog entries and also my pityful attempt at a first Twitter message.

Swurl doesn’t require you to define ANOTHER friends list (although you can if you wish).  Instead, as soon as you identify your identity on YouTube, Flickr, Del.icio.us, Twitter or FriendFeed, those identities will automatically populate your Swurl list.

Better yet, identify some favourites on Blockbuster’s “watch trailer” link or on last.fm and they can be played directly in the Swurl screen.

This is a very quick summary of swurl – I only discovered it today.  And if you *really* feel the urge to check out me as a 2-year-old, or see my gorgeous kids… you’ll find me here ( http://tritonsecure.swurl.com).

Come on in, the water’s fine!