New comer to the blogging 2.0 space Swurl aggregates online activity to deliver a Tumblr like experience with a unique timeline view as well.
The Swurl platform automatically brings a user’s web life together into a rich Tumblr-like format, with a focus on blogging as opposed to rss feeds. Standout features include enriched content, with bookmarked Pandora songs found and linked to on Seeqpod and full songs are posted + lyrics from LyricWiki, infinite scrolling, Open API (all content created on Swurl can be exported) and XFN microformat support.
Perhaps the best feature is the timeline view, that presents all your content in a visual time line. It’s nifty and rather appealing. Friend content is only presented blog style reverse chronologically, but a friends gallery like this would also have appeal. And a note for FriendFeed users, you can import your FriendFeed followers into Swurl as well, although naturally you don’t get the same FriendFeed style interaction.
The thing that rings alarm bells for me: Swurl promotes full reposting of content as a key selling point. It may provide some advantages in providing a seamless experience for the end user, but imagine this page from my Swurl stream with the full post publicly provided with the ability for people to comment on the content there and even Digg it. Did someone say Google duplicate content penalty? And then there’s the basically giving Swurl permission to reprint all your content on their own site for nothing in return…permission splogging perhaps?
Overall Swurl reminds me of Tumblr, and it comes with CName support so custom domains can be used. It hits the yet another aggregation service button for me, but I can see other people using this service, particularly users of services such as Tumblr. It’s simple, clean, functional, and occasionally appealing.
