Hackszine.com: Swurl - scrapbook your digital life

Swurl - scrapbook your digital life

Ryan Sit sent in a link to Swurl, a Web 2.0 application/startup he's been working on that attempts to collect all of the artifacts of your digital life and assemble them into a sensible whole. You could call it an aggregation tool—which, deep down, it is—but it does a little more than other things I've seen. Namely, it does a really nice job of taking in a wide range of relationship oriented services and turning the their inherent lock-in inside-out.

You just do your normal stuff online, Digg stuff, Delicious stuff, favorite Youtube videos, Twitter, rent videos on Netflix, bookmark songs on Last.fm, post photos on Flickr, etc. And Swurl brings it all together in a really deep way. We also enhance data, adding trailers to movies you rent and Lyrics to songs you bookmark.

All of these services get pulled together into a blog format and discussion and commenting can take place around any item. I think the idea is to help centralize the conversation instead of having it scattered about your different networks. Depending how busy your various online activities are, this may help you or it may just add yet another place to track comments.

What I like most, and the real hack from a Web 2.0 startup perspective, is that they programmed this to encourage you to maintain friends and use features across a number of social networks and easily traverse the relationships and data in all of them from a single location. Flikr is good for storing photos. Del.icio.us is great for bookmarking. Facebook is awesome for tracking friends. Swurl aggregates the relationships from all of the networks you inform it about and it recognizes when those users are also Swurl members. This encourages network growth, but isn't so greedy that it forces you to work only inside the Swurl fence.

Swurl [via Ryan]

Posted by Jason Striegel | Jul 1, 2008 08:46 PM
Life, Lifehacker, Web | Permalink | Comments (1)