Swurl

» see swurl.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Swurl was a lifestream, which was a word people used seriously for about three years. You gave it your accounts and it pulled them into one page: your Last.fm scrobbles, your Del.icio.us bookmarks, your photos, your videos, even what you had rented from Blockbuster. It arranged all of it as a calendar you could scroll back through, with thumbnails sitting on the days they happened, so the result read less like a feed and more like a diary somebody else had kept for you. By the time it was reviewed in mid-2008 it was connecting nineteen services.

It was also, visibly, a weekend project. A reviewer that July noticed the design was the default K2 theme for WordPress, right down to the header color, and that there was no way to bring in a feed of your own. Signup was a form on the homepage and the site would go and find your friends on the services you had connected. The public stream on the front page in January 2008 is a handful of real accounts posting about guitar practice and a surprisingly beautiful night in San Francisco.

Then it stopped. The Internet Archive has a full working front page on 20 February 2009 and, six days later, a 641-byte page saying Swurl was down due to performance issues and would be back up later that night.

~ the case file ~

~ two guys and a timeline ~

The farewell is short enough to quote nearly whole. "We built Swurl as two guys doing something we love in our spare time. Unfortunately, due to the pressures of our day jobs and other distractions, we can no longer support or maintain the service at the level that we think our users deserve." It thanks the people who used Swurl to document their lives and share them with family, signs off as Ryan and Jonathan, and adds a postscript pointing at their other work.

Glenn Fleishman wrote it up on 4 March 2009 and made the one observation that mattered to anybody affected: Swurl was an aggregator, so in principle no user data was lost. Everything in that timeline still existed on Last.fm and Flickr and the rest. What died was the arrangement. In Turkey this whole category passed by without landing, because the thing that already knew what all your friends were doing was MSN, and MSN did not need you to connect anything to it.

~ what was left in the html ~

The goodbye page is worth opening in a viewer that shows you the source. The outage notice did not get deleted when the farewell went up. It got commented out, and the farewell was pasted in underneath, so the file served from early March 2009 onward still contains the sentence "We are fixing our database stuff. We will be back up in about an hour." sitting a few lines above the letter explaining that nobody was coming back to fix it.

The two signatures are there in the source as well, hidden the way everyone hid an email address in 2009, inside a short piece of JavaScript that assembles the string at render time so a spam crawler cannot read it. Strip the tags out of that page and the signature line collapses to a single ampersand. The anti-spam trick outlived the thing it was protecting.

~ the day jobs ~

This letter is about time rather than money, which makes it unusual in a graveyard full of funding announcements read backwards. There was no investment to run out of and no acquirer to blame. Two people with jobs elsewhere had built something enough strangers relied on that leaving required an apology, and the apology is mostly an admission that the service was no longer as good as the people using it deserved.

swurl.com still resolves, and what it serves now is a redirect to PicClick, one of the two projects the farewell letter pointed at on its way out.

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