Twitter’s front-end look and feel on the web has been slowly improving over the past several months. But it’s still far from ideal, missing quite a few key elements that users turn to other apps for. And Twitter, with its APIs, is fine with that. Many of those are speciality web apps (photo and video Twitter sites) or much robust desktop and mobile clients (Tweetie, Seesmic, etc). But Brizzly, a new project launching today at our Real-Time Stream CrunchUp, wants to completely revamp the way you experience Twitter on the web.
Brizzly is the second project under Thing Labs, a development house started by former Googler Jason Shellen. Their first project was Plinky, a more proactive take on blogging. But Shellen decided the time was right to launch something that tackled the whole Twitter craze, and improved upon the experience of it. So he brought one of the creators of Google Reader, Chris Wetherell, on board along with a few others from that team and they built Brizzly.
It’s “fast, simple, and enhances reading and creation,” Shellen tells us. Some of the big features are that it allows you to create groups out of the users you follow, gives you insights into why certain topics are trending, and threads direct message conversations. It also gives you multiple account access, allows you to save multiple drafts of tweets, and keeps track of where you left off reading in your stream. And it should handle media (pictures and video) in a more seamless way that Twitter itself currently does.
Some of the more robust Twitter apps have variations on some of these features, but Brizzly is doing this while being entirely web-based. And it’s really the UI that will make or break something like this, and Brizzly looks like it has a nice one (see screenshot).
Plus they have a killer logo of what looks to be a bear wearing a dead Twitter bird’s skin.
And this is just the first step for Brizzly. They are considering future support for Facebook and some of the other social services, Shellen says. And they plan to do some mobile-specific interfaces, maybe even an iPhone app.
Following today’s preview, Brizzly will enter closed beta testing next week. You can sign up to receive an invite when they’re ready, here.
Note: The UI and design of Brizzly hasn’t been finalize yet, the image below is what the working model looks like.
Here’s the video demo of Brizzly from the Real-Time Stream CrunchUp:
It looks cool. There is some opportunity for color harmony, mixing Orange,Green,Blue,Grey, Limegreen. Hopefully this is changeable by the user.
Looks like it has more social features too. WOW … nice logo by the way!
…funny! So user can make a big psychedelic mess if they want. But please provide some suggested defaults that are not a big mess should user get lost & want to start all over with something highly read-a-ble.
is it realtime?
Wait, seriously? People need to save drafts of tweets?!?!
i save my tweet drafts on notepad – sometimes it’s for timing it on the right time, sometimes it’s while researching the right link to tag along
I think it’s more for people who use twitter for marketing and timing tweets.
I think this sounds fantastic – I’ve been waiting for a twitter app that lets me create groups. Is there one that exists now that I’ve just missed? I love twhirl, but don’t think it has that feature.
Would love to create groups for friends, tech news, general news, etc.
Besides TweetDeck I mean, I hate that that thing takes up so much screen space (hence the switch to twhirl).
Nambu and Seesmic also allow you to create groups. Tweetdeck is good because it will sync groups across all installations (desktop, iphone, etc.)
i think it would be best for brizzly to stick with twitter and not spill over facebook or other sns. they could lose functionality & ease of use while trying to be compatible (AND a consistent UI) over a wider array of platforms..
Identi.ca is much cooler than Twitter. It is based on free software (laconi.ca), and its features include groups, file attachments and threading, and you can even post to Twitter from it.
Cool! I can’t wait!
This should be cool. Twitter’s web interface is okay but it’s not very native feeling.
This should fix that. It’ll be useful for the Chrome OS!
Some good ideas, and yes, things like Tweet “save for later” and reschedule can be very powerful.
One thing: Can someone teach these startups to demo their stuff better? Either practice or hire a professional if you’re uncomfortable.
At a minimum, just open a number of Windows/Tabs with the use cases already cued up…
Amen to that. It’s almost painful watching some of these demos.
Don’t we already have TwitterFeedburner? I guess we can always use another feed reader.
I don’t love Brizzly’s logo. Looks like something you might find on 4chan.
SpC seconding your comment.
Looks promising. Suggest restraining # of fonts you’re using. Keep it to 3 different ones… If you want clean and high on the ‘ease of use’ chart. Some GDesgn rules really are timeless.
hoping someone, perhaps Brizzly, creates a more amenable feed reader for historical tweets.
Brizzly : who would name a company like that?
Now LOL and search Google for “brizz”. The first hit leads to a definition on UrbanDictionary:
Brizz:
1) a blow job
2) to give a blow job
3) see Ryan Burke
Source: http://dot-ly.o...our.se/brizzly/
Brizzly : who would name a company like that?
Now LOL and search Google for “brizz”. The first hit leads to a definition on UrbanDictionary:
Brizz:
1) a blow job
2) to give a blow job
3) see Ryan Burke
Source: http://dot-ly.o...our.se/brizzly/