The Brizzly logo
Today I signed up for Brizzly, a new web-based client for Twitter which offers a very similar user interface to Twitter itself, but with lots of the added functionality which most of us have come to use on a daily basis. It recently featured as one of LifeHack’s 5 best Twitter Clients (alongside TweetDeck, Seesmic, Tweetie and DestroyTwitter), so I was keen to give it a spin.
Registering
Firstly it’s worth noting that you need an invite code to sign up for the service at the moment. However, these are pretty easy to come by as once you’re signed up you can publicly tweet a code which ten more people can then use to sign up. Try doing a Twitter Search for “brizzly” and you’re bound to find one easily enough.
You then need to create a username and password, providing an email address. This is your Brizzly log-in, which is separate to your Twitter account credentials (presumably to allow the multiple account handling).
First impressions
At first glance the interface is quite simplistic and very similar to Twitter – with the central stream of updates and trending topics to the right. Anyone coming over from the Twitter site should have no problem finding their way around the basics here. Looking closer, though, you’ll find a wealth of additional features.
Features
Easy Retweeting
As well as Twitter’s ubiquitous commands to Reply or Favourite other tweets, Brizzly also gives you quick access to the equally essential ReTweet function. Sadly these features suffer the same accessibility issues as Twitter itself, in that you can’t navigate to those options without a mouse (i.e. you can’t tab to them). This means that certain users will need to keep using alternatives such as Accessible Twitter for the time-being, which is a shame.
Explanation of a Trending Topic on Brizzly
Trends explained
The next obvious addition is the function to view, and add to, explanations of Trending Topics. Click on ‘Why?’ next to each topic and it’ll expand to give you a brief explanation of the term. You can then perform a search of that term. This is a really lovely feature which adds tremendous value to the Trending Topics (which I previously tended to ignore).
Draft tweets
The ability to save draft tweets is an interesting one – on the one hand I’m not convinced that, given the limited length of tweets, this will save a lot of time. On the other, I have sometimes been in a position where I’ve tapped out a tweet then decided to postpone it for one reason or another. Saving it as a draft is a simple way of doing that, so it could prove to be a useful addition.
Groups
You can also create a number of groups, allowing you to lump together people that you follow according to themes. This could be really handy if you have a problem keeping your personal and professional streams separate, for example. You can only have up to 5 groups at the moment which is probably not enough for anyone really wanting to take advantage of this feature but that limit may increase over time.
Mute
A killer feature for me is the ability to ‘mute’ people who you are following – temporarily hiding their updates from your stream. I often find that I’d like to tune out of certain people’s updates, just for a little while (for example, if they’re live-tweeting an event which I’m not interested in) so this will no doubt come in handy.
Multiple accounts
Another crucial feature is the ability to manage multiple accounts and access them easily via small icons near the top of the screen. Again, limited to 5 accounts just now but hopefully that will increase. Unfortunately you can’t view streams from multiple accounts on one page – you have to click between accounts, essentially loading each one afresh which takes a few more seconds.
Other features
Other features include hosted image uploading, automatic image and video display and automated URL shortening (and it apparently also resolves shortened URLs from other people’s tweets so you can see the full URL, although this doesn’t seem to work all the time).
Brizzly also notifies you of new DMs via a little IM-style alert box, as well as alerting you to other new content (such as mentions) via a small blue dot. Again, though, this didn’t seem 100% reliable.
Conclusion
There are a few issues evident from using the service for a day. One annoying aspect is that the updating of your stream, in order to see new updates, is manual (as with Twitter – you get a prompt to refresh the page). It would have been much nicer if the updates dropped in automatically.
(Edit: 14th Oct) I was also initially frustrated that you couldn’t seem to easily access your follower/following lists, but posting this concern on Twitter quickly attracted a response from Chris Wetherell, co-founder of Brizzly, telling me:
@prettysimple It’s a little hidden in Brizzly. You can click ‘Profile’ on the left-hand side and then click ‘followers’ or ‘following’.
So 10 out of 10 for customer service!
Overall the interface seemed a bit clunky, although the features that it offers sets it well above the standard Twitter interface. I’ll be very interested to see how this service develops over the coming months, especially if it eventually offers integration with other social media platforms such as Facebook. No doubt many of the wrinkles I mention here will get ironed out too, and if they also put some effort into making the interface fully accessible they could be onto a winner.