You can see what it all looks like through this link to the blog of one of Swurl’s founders, Ryan. Be sure to click on the timeline tab on the header, which shows off the feature of being able to filter in social media activity from the past, all of which is offered up for viewing in calendar format.

Of course this is social media, and therefore you need to be able to include your pals by definition, and Swurl does this by allowing you to create a feed of all their activity too, Ryan’s is here.

Currently with 19 services able to be sucked into a Swurl blog, including those you’d expect, Youtube, Facebook, Wordpress, Twitter, Flickr etc. there is a far reach of usability as diversity can, depending on your own integration into the social netscape, reign supreme. Style Sheets can also be altered giving your piece of Swurl that unique look.

There appears to be a fair amount of activity in terms of people getting on board, and from initial impressions of the service and the site itself, it is easy to see why. However, one reservation would be the number of services that can be aggregated. Even though the big names are there, Swurl’s 19 is less than half of what FriendFeed currently harvests content from. Is this enough for the hardcore social media trend setter?

It is also possible to use a drag and drop feature with the places of interest on the site to create printable pdf files that function as your own travel guides. A nice idea, but I am as of yet unconvinced of its success.

An attitude that is arguably applicable to the entire site. Although comprehensive in many ways, pulling in data from Flickr, YouTube and Wikipedia among others, it feels a little surplus to requirements. This is probably a harsh assessment, especially since they have a groovy logo and name, and incidentally, are backed ($1.2 million) by MairDumont the travel guide publisher, an announcement made in conjunction with the launch. It’s as with most things, a case of time and in Tripwolf's case specifically, how ‘hungry for travel’ the social media savvy are.

Now, whether this is the case is an argument for another day. As RockYou, the company behind many apps, notably a host of Facebook and OpenSocial efforts has just tipped its cap and filled it with £35 million in venture capital. This hefty cash injection (I doubt it is in actual cash) will be spent on additional tools and services, increasing the company’s already dominant position in the market.  It is even being speculated that the “current momentum” will see RockYou becoming a top 10 internet property in a relatively short amount of time.

Via WebWare

Readers meet Plurk, micro-blogging with a prefix and karma. The prefix can be any number of words from ‘says’, ‘wants’, ‘hates’, etc. So you could say, 1000heads ‘loves’ social media, for example. Karma is a little bit more complicated, and quite a nice touch at that. It is a score out of 100 calculated on a variety of activities and interactions that you undertake within the Plurk world. The better Plurker you are, the better your karma. It is arguably nothing more than a ploy to keep you coming back, though if it is, then it’s a good one.

Want to see your life on the line? The horizontal Plurking time line that is… Then head to Plurk and see what you think.

*Not necessarily accurate…

With so much out there, the lost at sea sensation is always a mere step behind you when it comes to being net social. RWW’s post explores this battle to stay afloat as new start ups vie with latest trends for your online networking attention.

It is a concept-and-a-half, and surprisingly accurate and easy to read with each logo being so easily associated with a particular activity, there is no difficulty in understanding exactly what Jane has been up to. There seems to be one error however, as I’m not entirely sure which brand is represented by a Cannabis leaf, something brought up by the mass of comments.

This is a problem that Aza Raskin decided to address, and has done so rather successfully by all accounts. Rather than selecting a choice few or go the whole nine yards and represent everything available, both of which risk the alienation of a proportion of readers, Raskin created a workable solution for everyone. A piece of JavaScript that is able to tell where your blog readers have been recently, and in light of the information it digs out, present suitable badge options.

It works on the same bit of clever stuff that makes a link you’ve been to previously change colour, so you know where you’ve been, as you fly from one corner of the webosphere to the other. It is interesting and inventive stuff, and available at his site.

Via RWW

It is maybe this continuing interest that has encouraged Lost Zombies to risk the merger of flesh-eating undead with Social Media once again. Functioning as a social network, the site encourages users to provide evidence, in the format of uploaded content, of the existence of zombies. Once enough ‘evidence’ is collected then a feature length documentary will be produced to inform the masses of the holocaust around the corner. Personally, I can’t think of a better reason to join an online community. The world needs to be warned!

What the piece does illustrate though, is that habitual users of sites including Facebook, Myspace, Twitter and many other Social Media spaces are entering adulthood with no let up on the necessity to stay connected.

Well, in its wake comes Twistori, a simple, aesthetically pleasant site that pulls in tweets relating to six specific expressions of desire. Meaning if you put ‘I’ before love, hate, think, believe, feel and wish, someone on the other side of the world wide web may see your tweet scrolling gently upwards the Twistori page. A favourite quote lifted only a few minutes ago, “I think yogurt gives me an asthma reaction…”

For anybody in this position, the options are twofold; they can either take advantage of this web 2.0. company name generator and reinvent themselves as Zoomjam or something, or they can keep their chosen name and compromise with a potentially clumsy and less intuitive URL.

The issue then becomes how to get visitors to your disastrous, incomprehensibly-addressed website. With the information bombardment suffered by consumers these days, you can hardly expect them to remember their level of debt, let alone every web address that passes their way. Look no further than the Far East for your solution, where the clever trend is to advertise search terms rather than full domain names.

The benefits of offering memorable and intuitive keywords to replace long URLs are obvious, and by using search terms you can even direct people to specific pages on the site without needing to further complicate things by showing ‘slash’ or sub-domains. Of course, the use of search terms sound like an easy answer, but the possibilities offered pave the way for the future of advertising to put even greater importance on SEO and which search terms current visitors are already using to visit your site.

For more on the this head to here…

FriendFeed is also likely to alter that social network throng having made available its API. If as many developers get involved as were seemingly calling for it to be made available in the first instance then FriendFeed may be appearing in new places, on new platforms and in varying forms.

Named Colour Wars the concept despite being barely conceived, received a swell of interest and people eager to take part. A few of which exist in this very office! The current challenge is a bad-ass ro-sham-bo based rumble that is yet to be resolved.

Once the throws of rock, paper and scissors have been dealt and a victorious team announced, the challenge will begin anew, completely reborn. As what? Who knows? And that’s why we love it!

Actually, we’re about as connected as we thought previously. It is however nice to have it confirmed. Six degrees of separation is about spot on, with Microsoft’s bespectacled brain heavy types discovering from the 45 terabytes of information they skimmed that we, are on average, 6.6 steps from any other messenger user.

It is likely we are, if anything, more connected than this, as the study only takes into account MSN users and therefore omits other IM clients. The Mashable article covering this has a link through to the actual report should you feel like thoroughly enveloping yourself in statistics lending weight to the concept of a global village.

If you are yet to see the campaign that speaks with a reserved assurance then it would be unfair of us to discuss it anymore, instead you should simply take the test.