The Many Faces of Twitter: Brizzly

Twitter seems to inspire one of three reactions from people.  Either they love it, they hate it, or the just don’t get it.  There is not much that you can do with the middle group but if you are in the first group you are probably not using the official Twitter website as your primary way to access Twitter. However, if you are among the latter group, the reason you don’t get it might be because you probably are using the official Twitter website.

There are many many ways to access Twitter ranging from command line tools all the way up to slick Adobe Air applications like TweetDeck.   If Adobe made a decent 64bit Linux version of TweetDeck I would still be using it and have never discovered my current favorite Twitter “client”, Brizzly.

I use Twitter from three different PC’s on a regular basis and while I can do all kinds if fun synchronization stuff ranging from using Dropbox to  rsync to unison to sshfs to keep my settings and preferences all in sync across the machines but that really gets to be a pain and I started looking at a purely cloud based solution.   Because  I had absolutely no use for Twitter when I did not have an active Internet connection, this seemed an ideal situation where a hosted application would be perfectly fine.  The fact that I would be accessing it from 32bit and 64bit Linux as well as from the occasional Windows machine meant that a web based solution that worked fine in Firefox or Chrome would give me the best results.

I knew I hated the limitations of the actual Twitter.com site so I started asking for opinions from others on Twitter .    I ended up using TwitHive.com for a while.  TwitHive is @yongsu‘s valiant attempt to bring many of the features first popularized in TweetDeck to a web browser.  Its ability to create “Channels” (think Columns in TweetDeck and later Lists on Twitter itself).  TwitHive is a very nice, simple, and effective tool but I would mainly recommend it to people who are happy with a heavy client like TweetDeck  and just need occasional access to Twitter while away from their main PC.

Brizzly Bear

During that time I had a few friend’s taking part in Brizzly’s private beta.  They all seemed to like it so I signed up for an Invite and one soon arrived.   I created my account and linked my Twitter and Facebook accounts (in much the same way as in the TweetDeck client).  When I first got it all set up I have to say I was unimpressed.  It looked much like the normal Twitter interface with the iconic Twitter bird replaced with a teddy bear in bird drag (see right).

Brizzly Bar

Within two hours my attitude had changed and I have been hooked ever since.  Now many other clients do some of what Brizzly does.  You can click a TwitPic.com or Yfrog.com link in TweetDeck and see the photo, and there are several other clients that will expand links created through URL shorteners like Bit.ly and TinyURL.com.   Brizzly does all that and more.   In addition to the known image hosts like TwitPic and Yfrog, Brizzly checks ALL links for likely image destinations and will show them inline as shown in the video above.  It also grabs the embed code for links to YouTube.com videos and lets you watch them in place.

Brizzly also makes it very easy to get to everything that matters to me via the bar on the left.   I follow 177  people (as of right this minute) and it is not overwhelming in Brizzly.  I also like the fact that the Direct messages come up in more of an Instant Messenger style interface and off to the side so you can DM with someone without hiding your main tweets.

I thought I would miss my old columns in TweetDeck but the addition of Twitter’s Lists in combination with Saved Searches took care of that lack.

So, all in all, if you are happy with your way of using Twitter on a computer (Mobile devices are different) then more power to you, but if you are new to Twitter or you tried it once and didn’t like it or “get” it, please give Brizzly a try.