Swurl: Your Lifestream, Made Beautiful
RSS is magic and the things we do online are often beautiful - so why are all the interfaces for displaying the feeds of our activities so ugly? Enter Swurl, a visually stunning system for displaying a timeline of your activities on various sites around the web.
Developer Ryan Sit specializes in leveraging the visual to create new interfaces for data, his ListPic application lets users browse Craigslist by images. Just like Listpic creates a whole new experience for Craigslist, Sit hopes that Swurl will make interacting with lifestream data a much more visually enjoyable experience.
How it Works
The most important part of Swurl is the timeline view, where all the messages, bookmarks, album covers and photos you've saved in various services are organized in a calendar view. It's a great way to look back at days gone by - we've found already that it can't help but put your experiences into a different perspective.
In addition to the timeline view, Swurl also publishes your activities in a blog-type format. Each person's blog is highly customizable. If you've hesitated to send the URL to your crazy-chaotic FriendFeed page to your grandma, maybe you should send her to a Swurl page instead.
Inside of each item you'll find all kinds of visual treats, like a nice slideshow viewer, song lyrics displayed below the Flash audio player for each song in your time line and elegant captions on your photos. There are lots of nice little touches here and we hope it will only continue to improve.
One of the areas the app could really use improvement is in viewing your friends' activities. You probably don't want to use it for that, unless it's very casual. Swurl discovers your friends on various services but displays their activities in a boring list that's spotty and hours behind.
The big picture here for us is that RSS feeds and lifestream data in particular can really look great when displayed nicely and mashedup with various sources of data. By grouping your activities into a calendar view, Swurl really facilitates a change in perspective. We think you'll enjoy this app and we are excited to see where it goes in the future.
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I wrote about them yesterday too...and just posted a follow up based on their last.fm data where you make a cameo http://lifestreamblog.com/share-streaming-mp3s-at-friendfeed-and-swurl/
Posted by: Mark Krynsky
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July 3, 2008 3:03 PM
Looks like Tumblr meets FriendFeed
Posted by: Aaron Brazell
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July 3, 2008 3:07 PM
Swurl, in both blog and timeline form, is more pleasant to my eyes than FriendFeed. Comment tracking and status update posting would be great additions. We're thinking of using it on our corporate site as well.
Jargon watch: "YASNA" Yet Another Social Network Aggregator
I am really getting confused by all these aggregators that do NOT support portable data, or even OpenID. They expect to be chosen as my single point of contact for all my social networking but I have to go through a sign-up, then cough up my user name and passwords to all my accounts ( No OAuth! Grrrrr ) then make my new aggregated URL known to all my friends ( "Hey stop using my FriendFeed RSS, and start using this one!" ). SRSLY WTF?
Competing to see who can encrypt my personal data into their silo is a pointless endeavor.
Listpic was one of my favorite sites.. until Craigslsit made them shut it down. They had ads on there and CL got mad. To my knowledge, it no longer pulls from Craigslsit- it pulls from Oodle instead. I dont think Oodle agregates from CL does it?
Anyways, these are local San Diego guys and I saw a demo or the concept of this 6 months ago. I think I even met Ryan.
I wish him the best of luck. Another good service if you are into this type of thing. Go San Diego tech!
We have comment notifications through IM right now, plus a specific comment RSS feed. We plan to add ways to add content directly on Swurl in the future, but one step at a time. Right now I still go to the twitter website to post status updates, or use twhirl. Let me know your thoughts on this.
Posted by: Ryan Sit
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July 3, 2008 3:27 PM
Wow, thank you for the great review! We are happy you like the design and are excited to show everyone what we can do to make things even better in the next few months.
Todd, I totally agree with you, WTF to myself. We really want to support a ton of standards: OpenID, OAuth, OPML, Microformats... Really we just need more engineers, it is just 2 of us, 1 part-time. We are working on things as fast as we can, hang and you'll see all the important features you ever wanted.
Ryan
yeah, i like the timeline feature.
Posted by: edythe
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July 3, 2008 3:48 PM
Thats great! If anyone is after how to get notifications with FriendFeed, here is a neat workaround I've come up with: http://blog.sherifmansour.com/?p=222
Get FriendFeed notifications via Google Chat!
Thanks for the intro RWW. Just joined Swurl and really like it.
@Ryan: Good job guys. Can't wait to see where you guys are headed. Prefer it to Friendfeed.
http://steaner.swurl.com
to say the truth: this is nothing new or innovative.
It`s just like combining friendfeed with the wordpress autoblogger plugin.
absolutely awesome startup, i'd put money on them being around for a long time if I knew what there revenue model plans were. And as soon as they add css editing functionality, i'm on board full time.
Posted by: Zee from WeDoCreative
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July 3, 2008 6:49 PM
I like Swurl a lot. The sign up was a breeze and hooking services into it was a fluid process.
The timeline view is great.
Ryan is very responsive - via both email and Twitter.
Best of luck guys!
I think that Swurl works really well if you actively upload a lot of photo's. I am still yet to try this out but will definitely give it a look over the next couple of days!!
This is great.
http://stevegarfield.com
I love how it quickly shows you a whole year at a glance...
Nice job.
Oops.
Here's my Swurl timeline...
http://stevegarfield.swurl.com/timeline
Nice, it uses LyricWiki's API B-)
Here is another service very much like swurl: http://www.minmio.com/