Thing Labs releases peek at Twitter client Brizzly

August 13, 2009 | Kim-Mai Cutler | Comments | |

brizzlyThing Labs, a San Francisco start-up made up of several former members of the Google Reader team, released a video preview of its upcoming Twitter application, Brizzly.

About 80 percent of Twitter’s users don’t access the service through the main site. Instead, they go through third-party applications or clients like TweetDeck, Tweetie and now, Brizzly.

Brizzly expands shared photos and videos from Twitter so you don’t have to leave the application for a separate Web page. It also displays direct messages in an IM-like or more conversational way. The application is in beta testing at the moment.

It also has a feature called “mute,” in case you want to continue following a person but don’t want to see their tweets for awhile. It also creates groups of people like other Twitter clients, so you can follow several people with a common interest like your family or people who are really into wine, for example.

Thing Labs CEO Jason Shellen, who was in new business development for Google, recently hired Google Reader co-founder Chris Wetherell and engineer Dolapo Falola, who also worked on Reader.

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About the Author, Kim-Mai Cutler

Kim-Mai was born and raised a stone's throw from Apple headquarters in Cupertino by a devout Hewlett-Packard family. After attending UC Berkeley, Kim-Mai worked for Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires in New York, Los Angeles, London and Buenos Aires. Follow her on Twitter at @kimmaicutler, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.

  • brizzly is a great alternative for people who use the twitter web interface.
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    Perhaps you could use it for something else. Did anyone find a way to sign up?
  • Brizzly wins points for having a cute mascot character. :)
    It loses points for having a name that has nothing to do with twitter.
  • I like the mute feature. That would be useful for when someone goes on for a while about something, such as politics or a particular TV show.
  • Jason
    The Google Reader team is a good pedigree :)
  • csun
    I got invited to use Brizzly's service and so far I think its decent.
    The UI seems the same as the Twitter website,
    except that images and videos are shown inline.

    Another feature is that they allow users to write descriptions
    about the "Trending Topics". So if you want to know why
    "District 9" is popular, you can see a user generated explanation.

    The page renders kind of slowly (sometimes 5 seconds)
    but that's probably cause they have to call the Twitter API
    and wait for data to come back.
  • "Another feature is that they allow users to write descriptions about the "Trending Topics". So if you want to know why "District 9" is popular, you can see a user generated explanation."

    That feature seems super-useful if they can stop spam.
  • loloden
    oh/ nice )))
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    hhhhhhha