Brizzly, The Best Damn Twitter Client Out There [IMO]

I’ll be straight up, I am not a fan of Twitter apps that help me manage my stream. Sure, I “like” some applications and I think they are potentially useful but for some reason I could not bring myself to associate popular apps such as Tweetdeck or Seesmic Desktop with “Twitter” in any form or fashion, that was until Brizzly.

Brizzly is a rather new web-based Twitter client that demoed at TechCrunch’s Real-Time CrunchUp. A handful of invites were given out and a select few got in, one of these few was my good friend Manuel Mas who gloated about Brizzly every time we talked. At first I dismissed it as another useless web app that I would never use until Louis Gray, a prominent social media blogger did a review of Brizzly with a few goodies, invite codes. I figured why not give Brizzly a shot like I have every other Twitter app, so I did and it turns out, I love it.

The best way to describe Brizzly is that it’s the Twitter interface on steroids with a sprinkle of FriendFeed. Upon first logging into Brizzly you will find it very familiar to that of the Twitter Web UI but it is the little things that make Brizzly so much better such as:

• Multiple Account Support
  
  • Yes, Brizzly supports multiple accounts much like HootSuite and PeopleBrowsr, but I believe they do it a lot better. Instead of having columns with updates from your other accounts, clicking on account is like opening a whole new client for specifically that account. This I find to be very useful and helps me keep track of my accounts and what I am send where. There is own downside though, Brizzly only supports five accounts. While this is more than enough for most people, I know a few round-a-bout on the Twitterverse that would need more support (some people do make a living now helping businesses manage Twitter accounts).
    
• Group Support
  
  • Let’s all be honest, we care about some people on our Twitter feed more than others. For a lot of people this means managing some groups and periodically checking them. Brizzly allows you to do this, but their favorite numbers seems to be “five”. You are limited to making five groups, supposedly they have not figured out how to support more than five groups without breaking Brizzly altogether. That’s great, I love Brizzly and I sure don’t want to see it broken, but five groups is pretty limiting, especially when you’re the social media “elite”.
    
• Inline Multimedia Support (A Dash Of FriendFeed)
  
  • One of FriendFeed’s touted features is inline media. In other words, you can view videos, pictures and other media related items right within FriendFeed, or in this case Brizzly. This is very convenient, especially if you hating open more windows/tabs than you have to like me (right now I have twenty tabs open, I don’t need another one).

  

• A New Way Of Viewing Direct Messages
  

  

  • If your one of the few social media adopters who haven’t auto-followed everyone under the Twitter sun then you will actually find that your DM’s are quite useful at times, though is no one is arguing with the fact DM’s could be more “elegant” and a popular solution to this is threading DM’s in some clients. Sometimes though, this can be a not-so-fun game of “let’s hope this threads!” and can be just as annoying as using the regular old Twitter Web UI. Brizzly solves this by opening up an IM-like window in the right-hand sidebar, a convenient and quick way to keep track of your conversation.
    
• WTF Is The Reason For That Trend?
  
  • Twitter trends can be pretty meaningless at times and clicking on the the current trending topic isn’t much help either. Brizzly has leveraged the community of users to explain what the Twitter trends mean so you don’t have to find out yourself by digging through endless amounts of tweets.
    
  
• Shortcuts
  
  • If you are a power user of any application, shortcuts are vital. Curtiss Grymala of HTMLCENTER wrote a comment (as well as a review of Brizzly) that documented known shortcuts.
    

While I think these features above (with raised limits on multiple accounts and groups) and the intuitiveness of Brizzly make it a superior Twitter app, many will not adopt Brizzly as their main client and there are a few valid reasons for this.

• The Tweetdeck Effect
  
  • To be honest, Tweetdeck was the first really good Twitter app and as such, Tweetdeck has a lot of customer loyalty. Getting past that barrier will be the toughest thing for Brizzly to accomplish
    
  • COLUMNS, COLUMNS, COLUMNS. Ever since Tweetdeck people LOVE columns. I personally think that columns show too much at once, but hey, I am more of a “one thing at a time” guy when I look at stuff. I know some other people have some mixed feeling about this as well.
    
  • It is not a desktop app. I don’t know why this bothers some people that it is not installed on your machine (this is supposed to be the age of the browser… right?) but it is an issue nonetheless. Plus, Adobe Air?
    
• No Notifications
  
  • This is a problem with all Twitter web-based clients, there are no notifications. A huge issue, even for me. But as the browser and OS merge, I am sure we will start seeing notifications, Google Chrome is in the process of doing this already.
    
• What If?
  
  • All the features that Brizzly, Twitter could adopt at any moment. While these features are extremely nice and extremely intuitive, they are not necessarily “innovative” and nothing is stopping Twitter from picking up a thing or two with little to no complaint from Twitter users.
    

So where does this leave Brizzly? In a tough spot to be quite honest, but it can make it. While there are obviously dominant players in the Twitter app market (namely Tweetdeck and Seesmic) there is a spot for Brizzly in many people’s hearts. It is all a matter of how hard Brizzly pushes the Twitter app and how they improve upon the app in its current standing. While Brizzly won’t be taking over Tweetdeck any day soon, I have faith that Brizzly will create a disruption of sorts. Until then, here are some more screenshots.