During the last week read a few reports about Swurl. I have some good news and a point that I think is not so good. Some background, the good news and then some potential bad news follows. [Please not my addendum too]
The initial reference to the tool that caught my eye was made by Jane on her excellent eLearning Pick of the Day blog. I was then impressed with the screen shot on the Read/Write Web review of the tool. Since then Silvia Tolisano and Alan Levine have blogged about the tool.
I have been looking for something to replace my Jaiku badge as its servers are down quite often and I cannot perceive that any changes have been made to Jaiku since Google purchased the company last October. I thought that perhaps Swurl was the answer. As I mentioned I was impressed with the screen shot published as part of the report. I thought, “Could this replace my Jaiku badge?”
After reading the review I skipped over to Swurl and signed up. I was able to plug into my blog, twitter, del.icio.us and Last.FM feeds. That was all. For some reason I could not plug into my Flickr feed. I made several attempts. No luck.
So, I left a question on their suggestion page. More on that in a moment. Anyway, this morning I received an email from Jonathan Neddenriep at Swurl. He is pictured here with the other chap behind Swurl, Ryan. These gentlemen are real. Their feedback is excellent. This is impressive.
Jonathan mentioned in the email that they had added an additional feature that allowed you to enter the full url of your Flickr account. It worked for me. I could switch on Flickr. I think this level of support is brilliant. Simply outstanding. That is the good news.
Now, Swurl is good but it is not the solution for me. I was after a sidebar badge that could replace Jaiku but it was not to be. Perhaps one day Swurl will have a badge that I can embed on my home page. The Jaiku badge there takes in all my feeds (except Twitter ~ my choice) and it acts like a “What’s New” for my site and feeds.
Now, for the not so good point. There is one thing that concerns me about Swurl. When you mouse over any post or entry on your Swurl page a hidden comment field appears. Anyone can comment. What if spammers get a hold of this? It could become a nightmare. Even each individual Twitter post allows for comments. See below.
The comment feature needs to have controls not unlike that of a blog in my opinion. This has been raised on the Swurl suggestion page.
Addendum. Now for some more good news. This blog post has received a comment from Jonathan Neddenriep at Swurl. These guys are brilliant! Please read Jonathan’s comment below. Excellent.
July 6th, 2008 at 11:37 am
Thanks for the post about Swurl!
The badge idea is interesting – we’ve talked about that although up to this point we haven’t had time to work on things like that. We’d love to implement this in the future, although a third party developer could also use our API to do this.
As far as comments – yes, spam is an issue we’ve thought about. To this point we haven’t had a problem with it, but we have some safeguards in place to easily delete spam if it gets to be a problem. Also, you can simply double-click a comment to remove it.
Thanks for trying out Swurl and stay tuned, we have more cool stuff planned!!
July 6th, 2008 at 11:48 am
Thanks Jonathan. I am incredibly impressed with your response and the promptness of it. I am glad to see that you have your fingers on the pulse. I shall keep an eye out for a badge. I like the way the Jaiku badge has been implemented ~ hint, hint. ^_^
Best wishes, John
July 6th, 2008 at 12:48 pm
A badge would be cool, but right now we designed Swurl to become your main blog. You should try it out, Swurl is actually a pretty cool blogging system. If you totally wouldn’t do that, let us know why, we would love the learn how to make Swurl good enough to become your blogging engine. If that turns out to be unpopular we could always try another direction.
July 6th, 2008 at 1:37 pm
Ryan, Thank you so much for your comment. I hope I have not stirred the pot too much. Please let me know.
That is an interesting idea that Swurl could be your main blog. In my case I do not think I could switch over to Swurl entirely and allow it to become my main blog or gateway. Like many bloggers I have invested a lot of energy in my blog and its associated site. I have set up a self hosted WordPress blog and obtained a domain name, etc.
If Swurl was to become my main blog I would like to be able to post to it directly, just like a blog. Self hosting would need to be a consideration as well. I never considered Swurl as a replacement for my blog. I was hoping it could augment my blog and act as a junction point for all my activity on my site and blog, much in the same way as the Jaiku badge.
Personally, I am impressed with the Swurl interface and the the timeline. The manner in which blog posts, tweets and the like update is impressive. Your design is clean and uncluttered.
Swurl would be great for new bloggers, but they would need to be able to post to the Swurl blog directly. Yet, most users with Twitter, Flickr, and similar feeds probably already have a blog. There lies a conundrum. How to attract new users and existing bloggers to direct all their readers to their Swurl account as their main gateway on the net? Many probably will but not all.
Cheers, John.
July 6th, 2008 at 1:50 pm
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