Born in September of 2007 from the creative mind of Ryan Sit, a serial entrepreneur and Co-Founder of DropShots Inc., Swurl is a San Diego based startup that is taking on the trendy lifestreaming niche with a twist. Swurl lets users aggregate their social and blogging activity on sites like Digg, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Wordpress, and YouTube, to create one collective and enriched “blog” to share with friends and family.

According to Sit, the concept behind Swurl is the blog2.0 - taking the standard construct around the blog format and reenvisioning it as a conglomeration of your blog content, status updates, and online behavior. Sit even goes as far as to say that Swurl can be used to replace your existing blog, since it’s a single place where your audience can interact with all of your online content and activity.

jbruin on Swurl

Swurl makes it incredibly easy to add various content sources (while simultaneously adding your friends from each service), customize the look and feel, and create a polished looking blog in just minutes. Your content is displayed in reverse chronological order by date, with the dynamic conversation thread appearing to the right of each entry.

One really cool feature is that when Swurl pulls in your content from other sites, it also enriches that content by understanding the type and adding additional assets. For example, if you favorite a song on Last.fm, Swurl will also include the audio track, using the SeeqPod API, and the lyrics, using the LyricWiki.org API.

Swurl also displays content in a “Timeline,” or calendar view. The content type is identified as either Status, Link, Blog, Song, Photo, Video, Movie, Review, Wishlist, or Quote and displayed in thumbnail squares accordingly.

Swurl Quick Stats

  • 5,000+ registered users since the public beta release and the TechCrunch and RWW coverage
  • 19 total sources that you can add to make up your “Swurl”
  • 2 - the number of Swurl staffers

To Watch or Not

According to Sit, Swurl is currently operating without funding at the moment but is entertaining conversations with VCs. Sit was hesitant to discuss his vision for monetizing Swurl, although he assures me that there are a variety of strategies on the table.

Although Swurl is trying to differentiate itself from sites like SocialThing, FriendFeed, and even the Facebook Mini-Feed, I’m hard pressed to find a scenario where someone with a very strong personal brand would want to replace their existing blog with their Swurl blog. Since Sit admitted that early adopters are in his target audience, I think engaging this audience, who have glommed on to FriendFeed and previously Twitter (to the detriment of the argubably better Pownce and Jaiku), might be a bit of challenge.

In the immediate future, Sit plans to add comments to the Friends Feed area, create an email notification system, enhance the conversation system, and add more data sources.

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