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July 3, 2008 10:17 AM PDT

Swurl lets you blog without writing anything

by Josh Lowensohn

Swurl is a service for people who want to create a blog made from their activity on various social-media services. Like FriendFeed, SocialThing, or any other aggregator, you start building your Swurl blog by plugging in your usernames on each service. There are currently 19 to choose from, with all the usual suspects like Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, Amazon, and Yelp.

What's nice is that Swurl will retroactively seek out all your old posts and filter them in. Each post is set up by your day of activity, so if you didn't add anything to any of these services there simply won't be a post. You can also view your entire stream of activity in a large calendar, called a "timeline" that can be perused by year. (Check out mine here.)

Besides aggregating your news feed, Swurl has a social component that lets you do the same with others. You can follow other users just like you would with Twitter or Tumblr, and their streams of information will show up in chronological order in the friends tab. You're also able to see their friends list, and dig into their timelines to view their past activity.

There's already an active community of Swurlers using the service. Advanced users should also not shy away from what seems like a very simple tool; you can drop in custom CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), tweak the colors, and look and feel of your page to a very high degree.

One thing missing is a way to create entirely new posts through Swurl, so it's definitely not attempting to take over standard blogging platforms. FriendFeed, which essentially does the same thing as Swurl, will aggregate your business from all these networks and also manages to add its own publishing tool to boot. There is no such system on Swurl at the moment, but there should be.

[via Lifehacker]

Swurl turns your social activity stream into both a blog and this handy timeline. Here you can see shared pictures on Twitter, links on Delicious, and Twitter tweets--all on the same page.

(Credit: CNET Networks)
Josh Lowensohn is an associate editor for Webware.com, CNET's blog about cool and otherwise useful Web applications and services. If you've found a site you'd like profiled, shoot him an e-mail. E-mail Josh.
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Add a Comment (Log in or register)
by blabtech July 4, 2008 8:26 PM PDT
More ways to let the world know what you are doing...

http://blabtech.blogspot.com
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