Swurl: Blogging or Aggregation?

I've spent the last few days trying out Swurl on the recommendation of a friend. I can't quite decide if Swurl is an aggregation service, a lazy person's blog, a Tumblr rival, or all of the above. Whatever it is, it is certainly fairly simple to set up and use.

Swurl offers a way to aggregate your activity online, creating a sort of Tumblr style blog out of what you do and where you go while you surf. It follows a similar idea to that of Plaxo, FriendFeed and others of that ilk. It is missing some key features web users have come to expect in a functional aggregator though.

It accepts your information and activity from all of the major services like Digg, StumbleUpon, Amazon, NetFlix, YouTube, Last.Fm, Yelp, Flickr, FaceBook and more - 19 in all. Its most useful feature is accepting all of your old activity and aggregating it under the correct date - your Swurl is then immediately populated with your information from each of the sites you use, without any gaps in activity.

That was a fairly useful feature, as was the ability to create a header to make your Swurl page more attractive and personal. I was able to upload the graphic of my choice, then add a title that described a bit about me and where the information I was interested in fell in to my life stream. If FriendFeed took the time to make itself more personal and attractive like this, I'd spend more time there.

Why would FriendFeed win me over instead of Swurl if it offered the streamlined look and feel of Swurl? Because the one thing FriendFeed has that Swurl lacks is interaction. FriendFeed makes it possible for your users to comment on, like or otherwise interact with the content you aggregate. Granted, Swurl is more of a Tumblr style micro blog in appearance and FriendFeed is more of a personal aggregator, but they each have features the other could use.

You can add friends on Swurl, just like on Twitter, Tumblr and FriendFeed. This allows you to see their activity in your stream. You can also view your stream in a calendar format instead of a blog format, though I personally found that feature a bit annoying, much in the same way Plurk's time line annoys me.

If you are an advanced web user, there is a way to fully customize your page using CSS. I opted out of that in the interest of time, but it definitely offers you an excellent way to pull your activity together under your brand, or just to make your page look more like "you". Of course, it also means that some Swurl pages look as ugly as some MySpace pages do - there is accounting for personal taste, after all.

If Swurl were to add interactive features like commenting, voting or liking posts, hiding noisy users or the ability to Utterz, Jott, or micro blog an original post, it might get more of my attention. As it is, I'll file it into the list of sites I visit now and again, but not daily. I'll be interested to see if Swurl adds more FriendFeed like features in the future to stay competitive.