Stephan Miller

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

I sign up for about everything just to see what it’s like, which is why you might see me in a lot of different places. I like playing with concepts and new things. So if you messaged me or friended me and I haven’t done it yet, I will eventually. All of these type email notices get filtered into one email folder called "Friends" and then I go through and reciprocate a few times a week.

I signed up for Twitter and it took me forever to find the people I wanted to follow. I knew them on other networks but my mind went blank when I got there, so for the first two weeks, I followed less than 20 people. The same thing happened when I signed up for FriendFeed. And I don’t get the random friender’s. With these services, I follow for following. People post some cool stuff before it even gets around the net. You just have to find the right people and cut down the noise. If you want noise, just follow everyone on Twitter. You will get some noise.

Then again at MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog, Stumbleupon and the like, I can afford to throw a little friendship around. I don’t use these services for following people. A friend will not be hand delivering spam to my inbox.

Today I checked out Swurl. Once I added my services, I went to the friends page and all my friends were set up. It recognized friends I had from other services and added them as my friend at Swurl. Not only that, it listed all my friends accounts at other services. Now I can check out Andy Beard’s bookmarks, Danny Sullivan’s YouTube account or Chris Garrett’s Flickr account. Not that I wouldn’t have eventually run into these as I went along but it is kind of nice to see everyone’s account laid out like that. A perfect way to connect to old friends in new neighborhoods.

I wrote the title to this post shortly after finding this out as well as all the proceeding paragraphs and then I found out that this lifestream service does more than just the last little trick. When I navigated to the timeline page, I saw tabs for 2008, 2007, and 2006. Interesting. So I clicked on 2006 and there were items there. Amazing. It not only grabs the current feeds but imports everything from services that will allow it. I have been using Twitter randomly to store ideas. Now I know that I can find these when I want to without depending on Twitter. So maybe this is more like a "lifebank" than a lifestream.

And then I went to the front page again and found out that the page scrolls infinitely. As soon as you get to the bottom, it loads more items.

Swurl doesn’t cover the massive amount of services Profilactic does but it does have commenting like Friendfeed and SecondBrain. As far as new concepts go, this service does a lot more than other ones I have seen, so don’t let the plain exterior fool you.