Earlier today, I awoke to an excellent post from The Inquisitr introducing an exciting new aggregation and blogging tool called Swurl. Before I was even out of bed, I had created an account on the site and was already exploring its features. Here’s a brief first look at the service and what it offers compared to similar tools.
Swurl: Tumblr redux?
If you’ve ever spent any time with the microblogging tool Tumblr, Swurl will seem awfully familiar: it’s a service that “brings all your web content together into a blog format… supporting your existing blog, pictures, links, videos, and more.” Much like the older Tumblr, Swurl seems designed to keep things simple, yet content-rich. As soon as you create your account, you’re invited to import your activity from a variety of different services. Swurl currently supports the following:
- Amazon
- Blogger
- del.icio.us
- Digg
- Flickr
- FriendFeed
- Netflix
- Pandora
- Picasa Web Albums
- StumbleUpon
- Tumblr
- TypePad
- Yelp
- WordPress
- YouTube
It’s great to see support for some of the newer-age services such as FriendFeed; the Swurl team seems to be on top of the latest innovations in social media, whereas Tumblr has always been a bit behind on the times.
Once you set up these services, they’re all aggregated for you on your main page (view mine for an example). The look and feel of the site is immediately rewarding and extremely intuitive: it’s easy to tell what’s what. On similar sites, different services often come across as an indistinguishable wall of text.
A great feature is the way that commenting and discussion is conveniently integrated into the main page. It’s quick and easy to leave a comment; if you like, you can even set up AIM notification to let you know when a new one is left. For your convenience, items that are being discussed show up to the right of this feed (not shown in the image).
A few other features are worth initial mention, too. Swurl helps to mitigate early-adopter loneliness by pulling in activity from all your friends on other networks, whether they’re current Swurl users or not. The experience is certainly enriched if your buddies have Swurl accounts, too, but you’re not completely alone without them. This is always a nice thing to see.
Also, Swurl features a unique timeline view that I haven’t really seen anywhere else. It’s fun, attractive, and a great quick glimpse at what you or your friends have been up to on the Web. It’d be really neat to be able to embed this in another website; hopefully a lot of the great-looking features on the site will be portable within the coming months.
Facebook tried making timelines work with their user data a long while back, but it never seemed to pan out. Swurl’s approach makes a lot more sense.
One last item to note is that I had barely been registered with the service for ten minutes when I received a comment from Ryan, one of the service’s creators, just checking in to see if he could help me get situated within the service. It’s the occasional personal touch like that that proves the service really matters to those that are working on it.
First thoughts
With the first few hours I’ve had to play around with Swurl, I’ve been quite impressed and would not be surprised if the Swurl guys are able to steal me away from Tumblr for good. Depending on the next few features that are rolled out and how the community takes to this tool, chances are good it’ll become much more prominent across the Web. My gut feeling is that I’d recommend Tumblr for a newbie to blogging and creating content online, but give Swurl the thumbs-up for more experienced internet users.
If you utilize any of the services on the bulleted list above, I highly recommend you take a few minutes to start a Swurl account and explore it yourself. Comment here if you do; I’d love to see what you put together! Expect a follow-up post on this sometime soon, too.
(Thanks to Blah, Blah! Technology for inspiration for this post.)
- Secondbrain worthy competitor in the aggregation market As the number of social networks and services increases daily, it's aggregation tools like Secondbrain that will make the internet...
- Socialthing! readies version 2.0 Slick. Sexy. Simple. Even in its first iteration, Socialthing! has been drawing a heap of attention ever since its inception...
- What’s new with this blog I've been busy over the last week and a half implementing a bunch of improvements and changes to better suit...
