Give Your Life a Whrrl

No, I didn’t make a mis­take in my title. A Whrrl is an online sto­ry­telling tool that I recently found via my iPhone. At first, I wasn’t sure why I needed it or how I’d use it, but that has never stopped me from try­ing any­thing before.

(Note: I was not com­pen­sated in any way for this review. I found Whrrl on my own, started using it and I love it, so I wanted to share. Let me know what you think about Whrrl and be sure to add to my story that I cre­ated in this review.)

Whrrl

What is a Whrrl? It is an online story telling tool. You can cre­ate sto­ries with pic­tures and notes along with your exact loca­tion, share it with friends and fam­ily and share it on Face­book and Twit­ter. What really excites me about Whrrl is that you can have your friends and fam­ily (who also have a Whrrl account) add their pic­tures and com­ments to the same story using an iPhone or SMS from any cell phone.

For exam­ple, let’s say your fam­ily has an annual fam­ily pic­nic where every­one gath­ers to eat, drink and be merry. We all know that every­one brings their cam­era and takes lots of pic­tures and we all promise to share the pic­tures with each other. A few peo­ple may go home and do that, but the major­ity of the pic­tures stay with the per­son who took them, only to be seen maybe in the annual hol­i­day newslet­ter. But, with Whrrl, one per­son can cre­ate the Whrrl story, add their pic­tures and com­ments and then every fam­ily mem­ber (with a Whrrl account) can add their pic­tures to that story, write com­ments about any of the pic­tures that have been uploaded. Here are my Whrrl stories:

You can see my story from our out­ing this past Sat­ur­day night. There are 10 pho­tos that I took of us at din­ner. Below is what you see when you go to the story at the Whrrl site. This shows the loca­tion, who was there, the pic­tures and you can add com­ments here too. If you click on the “Tell Your Side of the Story,” you can add your pic­tures and notes to this story. Sto­ries can be seen by only you, your trusted friends (you decide who is trusted and who is just a friend), friends and every­one. You decide who will see the story.

Whrrl also has an iPhone app which, in my opin­ion, makes this an out­stand­ing tool because you can see what is going on as it’s hap­pen­ing from the view­point of many par­tic­i­pants. A few weeks ago, EAS Active launched their new Wii Per­sonal Trainer fit­ness game in New York City. I was able to fol­low some of the 30 day chal­lengers on their adven­tures at the launch while it was hap­pen­ing. It was the next best thing to being there. This is a screen­shot from Jes­sica Smith’s story, but you can see that 3 oth­ers who were there also added pic­tures and com­ments to her story.

So, let’s give this a Whrrl (pun intended). I am going to cre­ate a Whrrl story on my iPhone right now fol­low­ing these steps:

• Be sure you have the Whrrl app (link to app store) installed on your iPhone. Search “whrrl” in the app store from your iPhone.
• Open up Whrrl app
• If you do not have an account, you will need to cre­ate one first.

• When you first open up the app, you’ll see two tabs at the very top. The left one says “Say where you are” and the right one has an icon of a cam­era and a cir­cle with an excla­ma­tion mark in it. Click the “Say where you are” button.

• Click inside the “Say where you are” field and add your loca­tion. It will try to find loca­tions of places around you, but you can add new ones by click­ing the “+” at the top right. For me, I added one called Home and the loca­tion is Chan­tilly, VA. It did find my home address right away, but I didn’t want to post my home address. You may have to scroll down all the way to find the ones you’ve added.

• 
• In the “Can be Seen by…” field is where you decide who can see the story. If you just want to remem­ber this event for your­self, choose You. Trusted Friends is a for Whrrl friends that you have decided can be ‘trusted.’ Friends is for any Whrrl mem­ber that you have listed in your friends (whether they are trusted or not). And The Pub­lic is any­one whether they are your friend or not.

• Now let’s add a pic­ture. Click on the tab with the cam­era icon. Click on photo. Choose between Cam­era (take pic­ture now) or Photo Library (find a pic­ture you’ve already taken.) I chose cam­era. I am not tak­ing a pic­ture. Either Use Photo or Retake. It will upload the pic­ture to your Whrrl story and take you back to the photo/post/share tab.

• Now I’d like to add a com­ment about this story. Click on Post. Type in some com­ments and click Save. It takes you back to the photo/post/share tab

• If you added your Face­book and Twit­ter accounts to your Whrrl account you can share this story (or any) with your Face­book and Twit­ter friends. I will do that right now. If you are a Twit­ter or Face­book friend of mine, you will be able to see it.

• You can click on the photo/exclamation mark tab to close it. That’s it! Pretty easy and now you can go to my story at Whrrl via the iPhone and add a pic­ture and com­ment to my story. Be sure to add me as a friend to your account too.
• Go to my story and leave a comment

A few things I’d love to see on Whrrl:

• Abil­ity to add video
• Abil­ity to add to join in a story directly from the web page
• Be able to change the size of the wid­get for my blog. The cur­rent one they have is quite large and doesn’t fit well into my side­bar where I’d like to have it.
• Cus­tomiz­able pro­file pages.
• Avail­abil­ity on plat­forms other than iPhone (Accord­ing to their web­site, they are work­ing on this)

Whrrl has a few of their own tuto­ri­als and a blog with a lot of use­ful information.

Over­all I’m giv­ing this 4 out of 5 stars on my use­ful­ness scale. I think once it is avail­able on other plat­forms, it will be a 5 out of 5. Cur­rently, Whrrl is still offi­cially in beta, but I have not found any­thing buggy about it at all. It has been quite reli­able and a whole lotta fun!

We are tak­ing a trip to Orlando in 3 weeks and I plan to use Whrrl as a jour­nal of our trip. We are going to be vis­it­ing with friends and fam­ily while down there and I’m hop­ing to get them on Whrrl and have them add their pic­tures. When­ever we travel, I always plan to take notes about our trip so I can refer to them when I go back and cre­ate a scrap­book or put the pic­tures to DVD, but I never remem­ber to do it and it’s usu­ally quite incon­ve­nient. I think Whrrl is my solu­tion to that problem.

Related arti­cles by Zemanta

• Whrrl Brings Col­lec­tive Location-Based Sto­ry­telling to Your iPhone (mashable.com)
• Whrrl’s geo-social net­work comes to the iPhone (news.cnet.com)
• Where 2.0 Pre­view — Pelago’s Jeff Holden on Cre­at­ing Sto­ries Out of Your Life (radar.oreilly.com)

Tagged as: App Store, exact location, Facebook, family member, family picnic, Fitness, friends and family, geek, holiday newsletter, iPhone, review, saturday night, Scrapbooking, storytelling, twitter, whrrl