Brizzly – Making Twitter More Like Friendfeed

The other day, Holden Page from Techgeist told me I needed to check out a new service called Brizzly. At this time, the service is still in private beta, requiring invitation codes to sign up. He sent me an invite and I signed up for the service. I’ve checked it out over the last few days, and have really come to enjoy it. There are, however, still a few more features I’d like to see added before I make the switch from Tweetdeck.

The Good

A screen shot of the brizzly service A screen shot of HootSuite in single-column mode

On the surface, the brizzly interface resembles HootSuite when you have it set up to show only one column. However, the inner workings of brizzly are actually quite different (for good and for bad) from HootSuite.

Following are some of the really nice features of brizzly:

1. brizzly automatically locates and displays photos and videos people link to in their tweets. For instance, Chris Brogan linked to a photograph of a broken mirror in one of his tweets. Rather than just seeing the link to YFrog, I get to see the photograph he uploaded. So far, I’ve confirmed that brizzly displays photos from YFrog and TwitPic and that it pulls in YouTube videos. I’m not sure what other services it pulls into your feed, yet.
2. brizzly also automatically resolves shortened URLs. Any time a shortened URL is posted on Twitter, brizzly automatically converts it back to the full version of the URL. For instance, Alex Wilhelm posted a link to his latest story on Techgeist within one of his tweets. On Twitter, he posted a shortened URL (http://bit.ly/LDbej), but brizzly shows me the full URL (http://techgeist.net/2009/09/retweetcom-hits-million/). Unfortunately, this feature seems to be a bit inconsistent at the moment. Sometimes the URLs are automatically resolved; other times just the shortened URLs appear.
3. You can “mute” specific users. If one of the tweeple you’re following starts tweeting a bit too much for your likes, you can mute the person, causing their updates not to show up in your timeline.
4. You can save drafts of tweets, in case you decide you’re not quite ready to post it, yet.
5. brizzly automatically shortens URLs for you using bit.ly. Simply paste a link into the tweet you’re preparing, and it automatically gets shortened when you submit the tweet. As with many of the other Twitter clients that use bit.ly to shorten URLs, though, there doesn’t seem to be any way to associate your shortened URLs with your own bit.ly account.

Other than those features, much of what you see in brizzly is very similar to what you’d find in many other Twitter clients. You can save specific searches on Twitter, you can follow/unfollow users when you view their updates, you can upload photos and post them on Twitter and more.

One other neat feature in brizzly is the fact that the service attempts to provide you with an explanation as to why certain topics are trending. On the right side of the window, you’ll see a list of the top trending topics, and each one has a “Why?” link next to it.

The Missing

Unfortunately, there are still quite a few features that I feel are missing from brizzly. Following are a few of them. Since brizzly is still in beta, I’m hoping that at least a few of these will be implemented within the next few weeks or months.

1. At this time, you can only view one “column” at a time. Because of that, you can only view one account at a time. In order to keep up with what’s going on between multiple accounts, you have to continuously switch back and forth between them.
2. The interface works similarly to the way Twitter Search works. It automatically notifies you that new information is available by saying “Refresh to see newer updates,” but it doesn’t automatically update. I would really like to see an option to make brizzly automatically refresh your list of updates in specific intervals.
3. Only Twitter accounts can be pulled in to brizzly. It would be really nice to see the option to pull in Facebook updates and possibly even Flickr, etc. as you can with Friendfeed.
4. The saved searches are still rather simplistic. This appears to be an issue with the Twitter API rather than any specific Twitter client, as I don’t think I’ve found any Twitter clients on which advanced Twitter search works properly. What’s even more inconvenient than the fact that advanced Twitter searches fail is the fact that you don’t get any notification of the failure. Instead, the Twitter clients all seem to just tell you that there were no matches for your search.

The brizzly service also seems to be severely lacking in documentation. For instance, after searching the site for quite a while, I was never able to find any inference that brizzly automatically shortens URLs for you. In order to find that out, I had to test it. There’s also no real documentation on what types of searches can be saved through the service.

I also feel a little bit slighted by the service. When you arrive at brizzly’s site, the only information you see, other than a form you can use to request an invite code and a link to login if you already have an invite code, is the following (emphasis added by me):

“Brizzly is a simple way to experience the social web. You can request an invitation code below and we’ll let you know when we have them ready. (Soon!)”

With brizzly only supporting Twitter (so far, at least), I would hardly say that you can truly experience the “social web” with it. In addition, with that being the only information available to potential users, I just don’t see why people, other than those reading reviews like this one, would even be interested in trying it out.

Conclusion

Brizzly is certainly shaping up to be a nice service. With the inline display of photos and videos, the automatically resolved short URLs, etc., it really has the potential to turn Twitter into a service similar to Friendfeed. Unfortunately, however, with some of the major features of Friendfeed and other Twitter clients missing, it still has a long way to go. The service is very promising, but it’s going to take a bit more before I’ll make the switch.

Related: In-depth comparison of Tweetdeck and Seesmic