Skip to Content

Submit your nominations for the Luxist Awards' Best in Decor
AOL Tech

timeline posts

Filed under: Internet, Social Software

Swurl brings all of your social networking activity together

Swurl
Once upon a time, letting people know what you were up to online was simple. You'd just point your friends toward your blog, LiveJournal page, or MySpace where you posted all of your latest musing on life. But if you're an active netizen, odds are your social activity is spread out across a half dozen or more sites, ranging from YouTube to del.icio.us. Swurl is a new service that helps bring all of your status updates, bookmarks, watched videos and other activity together.

If Swurl sounds a bit like FriendFeed, it kind of is. Both services let you gather all of your social networking activity in one place. But Swurl is a lot prettier and more customizable. You can think of it almost as a meta-blog. If you have a blog on Blogger or WordPress, you can configure Swurl to display all of your latest posts in blog-like format. But it will also show your Twitter and Facebook status updates and other activity in chronological order. Or you can hit the search box to search all of your sites.

Anyone can comment on an item that shows up on your Swurl page just by hovering their mouse near the bottom of an update. And you can use Swurl as something of a start page by hitting the Friends tab to see what your contacts have been up to. There's also a nifty timeline view that shows your updates plotted out on a calendar.

Swurl was developed by Ryan Sit, the same guy who brought us Listpic, an awesome interface for browsing online classified sites.

Your Timetoast is ready! Build timelines with this web app

TimetoastTimetoast is an attractive new timeline app built on Abode's Flash and Flex. Do you like your timelines interactive and embeddable? Sure beats the last timeline we made (crayons and construction paper may have been involved)! This could be a good tool for bloggers who want to enhance a post with a detailed history of the topic, or for anyone in school who doesn't want to approach the aforementioned crayon method.

Since Timetoast is pretty new, we hope there'll eventually be more options for colors, fonts and the size of embedded timetables. We like the ability to add images to events, but we'd also like to be able to drill down to hours and minutes, instead of days: a timeline of a day might come in handy! For now, it looks like they're off to a promising start.

Filed under: Social Software, web 2.0

Timeline your life with Dipity.

DipityTimelines are a great way to provide an overview of events. But what's even better is a timeline that generates content automatically based on information you probably already have.

Dipity takes automated timeline creation to a new level. If you have (and quite frankly who doesn't) a Blogger, Flickr, WordPress, YouTube, Twitter or any of the other supported social networking site just enter in your user name, URL or an RSS feed and dipity will do the rest.

You can view your timeline in years, months, weeks or even one day. Dipity also let's you rate your events so that those with higher ratings are displayed more prominently than others with lower ratings.

You're free to embed your timeline on your own site or list them on dipity's searchable directory.

If you ever wanted to see your online life sprawled out in front of you, dipity is one way to go about it.

Filed under: Design, Internet, Web services, AOL

Create a timeline with AOL's circaVie

Cat timeline
AOL has launched circaVie, a new service that allows you to create photo timelines that you can share with friends or embed in a website.

CircaVie lets you upload photos one at a time and put a title, date, and description on each. The web service does the rest, arranging the photos on a timeline. The effect is a professional looking timeline... so long as you don't have a lot of gaps.

The service does a pretty good job of determining whether to show your timeline in hours, days, weeks, or months depending on how far apart your entries are. But if you have a few photos from three years ago, and a few more from yesterday, you'll have to scroll through a lot of blank space to get from one set to the other.

[via Somewhat Frank]

Filed under: Fun, Internet, Web services, Social Software

You too can be a nosy neighbor with iStalkr

stalk friends with istalkrWho's up for a little stalking? Its ok, no Britney Spears stalking, just some RSS and ATOM feed stalking. iStalkr is out of beta and ready for users to create a world of spying and nosiness.

iStalkr is a web application that creates a "lifestream" that will track RSS and ATOM feeds from a variety of services that you might use throughout the day including Digg, Del.icio.us, Flickr, Google Reader and Twitter over a time line. From that point, you can choose to paste a time line of data into a website or blog to let people know what you are up to, or monitor other people's timelines to see what they have been up to.

It's a pretty cool application, but really doesn't serve any other purpose.. Sure its great to see how many times someone twitters, when they check out their news feeds, and how many times they Digg something throughout the day, but it's just another fluffy Web 2.0 gadget.

[via Profy]

Filed under: Windows, Office, Productivity, Microsoft

How to create timelines in Excel

Create a Timeline in Microsoft ExcelAh, Excel. I can't think of any app more frequently used for something other than its intended purpose. Today I learned how to make timelines in Excel, from Microsoft's own Education site, of all places. It's a very short tutorial, but in case you've ever needed to create a timeline, and fast, don't overlook the flexibility of Excel. Handy.

Filed under: Developer

The most important software innovations ever

The Most Important Software InnovationsAjax may be the coolest thing since sliced arrays (*ducks*), but in the grand scheme of things it doesn't really compare to many of the things on David A. Wheeler's list of The Most Important Software Innovations. The updated-for-2006 list spans more than 150 years, from the birth of software (with Babbage's Analytical Engine in 1837) to the first compiler in 1952 to the spreadsheet in 1978 and so on. After his timeline, Wheeler takes a few moments to talk about software patents ("Software patents have essentially no relationship to software innovation.") and what makes an innovation important and what doesn't. Overall, an educational and, if you're a history-of-computing geek like me, entertaining read.

Featured Time Waster

Graveyard Shift - zombie-busting Time Waster

With Halloween fast approaching, it's a great time to get in some practice defending your territory against zombies. In Graveyard Shift, you take aim at zombies and other creepy-crawlies, blasting them into splatters of cartoony green guts. It's a casual first-person shooter, and it's very easy to get the hang of - use the mouse to aim, click to fire. Graveyard Shift has at least 15 levels, and it might even have some secret stages I haven't unlocked yet. They key to getting good at Graveyard Shift is learning to use ...

View more Time Wasters

Featured Galleries

Defective by Design, London: Protest Pictures
Microsoft Security Essentials
Chromium Pre-Alpha on CrunchBang Linux
Safari 4 Beta
10 Firefox themes that don't suck
IE8 RC1
Download Squad at the Crunchies After-Party
Download Squad at the Crunchies
WordPress 2.7
Cooking Mama: Mama Kills Animals
Windows 7 Hands On
Comodo Internet Security
Android First-look: Amazon.com MP3 Store
Android First-look: Twitroid
Google Reader Android
Android Hands-On
Twine 1.0
Photoshop Express Beta
Mozilla Birthday Cake
Palm stuff
Adobe Lightroom 1.1

 


Follow us on Twitter!

Flickr Pool

www.flickr.com

More Tech Coverage

AOL Radio