SWIRL - Connect. Communicate.

Just the Facts

What is Swirl?

Swirl Connect is location-based software that installs on your phone to help you stay connected with friends and meet new people. Some people have described it as a mobile friend finder, because it alerts you to your friends' activity and locations. Swirl is not a social network!

Because you're not always on the move, Swirl also has an online control panel that helps you get the most out of the software. This panel helps you manage your friends, groups, and settings; archive your connections, guestbook, and activity; find people, places, and photos; and it also integrates with other web services (in parlance du jour, a "mashup").

What can Swirl do for me?

While it does a lot of different things, we focus on making connections: 1) Swirl makes it easy for you to connect with new people with proximity scanning and local content discovery; 2) Swirl will help keep you connected with your friends and what they are doing while you or they are on the go.

When you're on the move, you'll start Swirl Connect on your mobile phone. It will tirelessly work, matching you with other Swirl members, and alerting you when you're near someone you want to meet. You can find out more about them, connect for a chat or free text messaging, meet face-to-face, or just leave a note in their guestbook. Even if you don't chat with them, the connection will be saved and synchronized with your online control panel, so you can always go back and check out their profile or their public activity. It's a great way to meet actual, real-life friends.

Swirl will send you periodic alerts of your friends' activities and locations. If they're heading somewhere, Swirl will tell you. If they've just checked into a placemark, taken a photo, left a virtual post-it note, or any number of activities, Swirl will let you know with a scrolling ticker or screen-based alert. If you pause in a physical location, like a store, bar, or a friend's house, you can 'Mark' your presence there. It's like checking into a hotel. Now your friends know where to find you. You can add photos of or notes about that place you're visiting, and your friends will be able to view that activity. You can fire up the group messaging feature (free mobile instant messaging) or use the Quick Talk feature (like Push to Talk) to directly contact your friend list.

Another popular feature is being able to find nearby places of interest. Swirl will help you explore an area, showing you all of the people, places, notes, and photos nearby.

It will make you look ten pounds lighter, appear interesting and smart, intrigue the young, and confound the elderly. It will make you witty and charming with the opposite sex, fatten your wallet, and give you boundless energy. If you'd like to learn more about what Swirl can do, why not check out Swirl in action via the tour or view a summary of available features?

How easy is Swirl to use?

We tried to make Swirl as easy as possible to use, and thanks to your feedback, it's getting easier with each release. Most of Swirl Connect uses popular interaction models that you already know, so if you can use an instant messenger, you can probably use Swirl. There are several areas that we'd like to streamline, and we will get around to that in the coming months. And of course, help is always available.

How do I get started using Swirl?

The first thing you need to do is create an account. Once you do that, we'll walk you through getting the software onto your phone. From there, feel free to start up Swirl anytime, or review your settings and create your profile—we'll keep everything synchronized between your phone and online control panel.

Will Swirl work on my phone?

Check out our supported devices list (select your phone brand to the right to check). If your phone appears on this list, then Swirl will probably work on it. There are two levels of support (Full and Partial), and the support level, testing status, and any known issues will be listed.

We are aggressively adding support for new phone models, so if we don't support your phone now, we might in the near future. Swirl is also compatible with more phones than we have on our supported devices list, so if your phone meets the minimum requirements, we have several generic builds that might work for you.