If you’ve heard of Swurl or Sweetcron, you’re familiar with the idea of mashups of your Web 2.0 interfaces (Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, and so forth) into a single site or page to centralize your information. Storytlr is a bit different, though, bringing something unique to the stage that will, I think, appeal to a lot of people.
Often, startups are all about funding and have little to offer in real world application. Even more often, they’re about ideas with no basis in reality and little chance of success. Storytlr is neither of these. It’s a great idea, which I’ll get to in a minute, that was started on bootstraps with little focus on gaining more capital infusion and lots of focus on making the product work.
The idea is pretty simple when looked at on its face, but complex enough to be new and intriguing. Take your social networking sites like Flickr, ad in your favorite RSS feed from, say, Google Reader, and stuff up your photos from somewhere like Facebook and put them all together on a site that integrates them by timeline (which you can tweak as much as you’d like). This timeline becomes a story, which is presented to the world on your page and evolves as your sites that feed into it are updated.
Currently, Storytlr can interface with Twitter, Myspace, Facebook, Google Reader, Delicious, Flickr, Lastfm, Picasa, and several others. You can control the timeline or insertion of photos, information, and so forth to customize the output. Several other options allow for your Storytlr site to be completely unique. Your depth of control is completely up to you and even novice Web users will find Storytlr to be fairly simple to operate, but gurus will love the seemingly infinite tweaks that can be performed.
Right now, content is fairly slow to appear (taking several minutes to an hour in some cases, depending on server load), but that is mainly budgetary on Storytlr’s side. Remember: they haven’t been out begging for venture funding, but instead building a great product. The concept is solid, the application is strong, and it’s continually improving with new implementations. I expect the funding will find them on its own.
It’s free to sign up, but I caution you that it becomes addictive. You’ll find yourself spending several hours at the outset fiddling with the controls to perfect your Storytlr page. I know I did.
