Not surprisingly, I live much of my life online and there are digital artifacts of me floating around all over the place. There is this blog, my other blog, and then my other blog, Facebook, del.icio.us, Twitter, Flickr, Last.fm, Picasa, Amazon, YouTube – I have accounts with all and I use them all on a (somewhat) regular basis. For someone who may want to follow my life, that’s a lot of content to keep track of. Which is where Swurl comes in.

Swurl is an aggregation service that allows me to pull all the information from the other services I use and display them in a central location. It’s a powerful example of the small pieces, loosely joined philosophy that strongly resonates with me.

Swurl is dead simple to use, thanks to the magic of RSS (which I think should really stand for Radical Societal Shift for it’s massive contribution in reshaping how we interact with information). I created a mini-site pulling in my most recent activity from my blogs, Twitter, del.icious, Flickr, Picasa, YouTube and Amazon in less than 5 minutes. Swurl displays this information chronologically with my most recent activity first.

I agree with Alan that one of the more interesting features of Swurl is the timeline feature. It’s a nice way to handle the archiving of my digital life (although that Twitter post from December 31, 1969 is quite strange. But then again, it’s Twitter.).

I suspect that services like Swurl will become quite common as more people begin to use more web based services. There is going to be demand for a central place to pull all this information together, and Swurl does this very nicely, without being forced into a walled garden like Facebook.