A deep dive into digital marketing

Swurl, worth a look and a sign-up

Posted by Chris under Facebook, Friend Feed, Social Networking, Swurl, Technology, Twitter, Uncategorized

As if friendfeed wasn’t enough, along comes Swurl and from my first 15 minutes I can already say it’s worth a good and deeper look. Just like friendfeed it can aggregate all of your disparate sources yet it’s being positioned as more of a life scrapbook.

Swurl is essentially a lifecasting aggregator that pulls your current activity from web services, all the usual suspects are here: like Flickr, Twitter, Amazon, Pandora and about fifteen others.

Perhaps the coolest feature of Swurl is that the site automatically detects what kind of content it is pulling (from your other sources) and “enhance” it accordingly. So things like Flickr photos will be shown in full size along with a slide show. Another great feature is the Timeline and impressive calendar function to visualize when actions have occurred. Put on your marketing glasses as you look at this, I spy a way to monetize within this calendar. Ryan and Jonathan if you haven’t figured this out yet, give me a ping I’ve got some ideas for you.

In public beta now, no codes or referrals needed to join. And IA/UX people you’ll love the sign-up process, three simple fields, it doesn’t get much easier.

PS have to figure out security settings as it seems anything you put out there is all public all the time

in/out of love with Twitter

Posted by Chris under Friend Feed, Pownce, Twitter, Uncategorized

Once again as the fail whale makes it’s beautiful (yet annoying) flight over the Twitter waters the last few days I have to ask myself why Twitter has such a hold over me.

I also use Pownce (well only sort of), Plurk and am still waiting for a Jaiku invite (anyone) but Twitter seems to be a nexus of the conversation.

A while ago Scoble wrote about the conversation moving to Friend Feed when Twitter is down and earlier today Jeremiah Owyang asked on Friend Feed by Pownce and Jaiku aren’t taking advantage of Twitter’s outage.

And what I’ve found from my own unscientific poking around is that for some people the conversations are moving to Friend Feed. Why, well in Friend Feed not only are comments aggregated there but you can also comment on the posts or posts made on Friend Feed.

Yet Twitter still, as the dude says, “abides.”

Personally I think Friend Feed has a weak interface, which (I and others) don’t help by adding all of our services in. If you just look at mine here, it’s not so bad to follow but on the mega end of Robert Scoble it stars to get a little hard to follow the conversations.

That and the double/triple posts that then happen in other places can be a bit annoying. But that’s less a friend feed issue and more of a what single services do you have on your page as well as Friend Feed

But with all this said I’d recommend getting on Friend Feed if you are not already. It is an amazing aggregator and has more hooks to social, photo and conversation apps than I even use! Now if maybe they’d bring in Russ and David to do some IA/UX work!