Back in the dark ages there was BBS.  Eventually this evolved into usenet.  Then after the millenium it came … MySpace, blogs, wikis, photo-sharing, micro-blogging and more … pretty much every social networking idea conceivable.  Now enter Swurl.

Swurl is a lifecaster (life Friendfeed and Spokeo) - a social networking aggregator.  In short, it pulls all the data from all your various social network activities and aggregates it into one place.  More than that, it uses somewhat intelligent decisions about the content and context to attach related materials.  For example, if you rent a movie from Netflix, Swurl appends it with a YouTube link to the trailer.  Interesting.

This may sound a bit intrusive, and to me it is, but only because it’s being shared.  Nonetheless, it does bring up some interesting issues about where we are headed.  Many industry experts, including Web inventor Berners-Lee, foresee the Web becoming a tool where semantics yields to intelligent agents that link enough intelligently associated information together to basically make your life easier.  Is this not one step closer to that?

For more on Swurl, check out this article on TechCrunch or Swurl’s web site.  Any of my student’s who’ve started using this, let me know what you think.  And maybe I’ll slice out a couple of hours and set it up for myself.  Like you’d really care what the hell I’m doing (and if you do, that’s a bit scary and I still don’t get why one would want to).