Brizzly Inline

A long time ago I discovered TweetLens on Boris Mann’s site. I was looking for a web based Twitter client that allowed me to synchronize my reading between computers. Tweetlens offered this and was pretty slick.

Tweetlens has a long list of features that I love, but recently something happened on the site, and I started having problems logging in and getting content. It was unavailable for a while, and when I could login, it seemed a lot slower for some reason. The creator of TweetLens has also moved on to other projects and put the source code up on GitHub. I took a peak at the code, but it didn’t think it was in a state where I could figure out how to install it on my own domain.

I started to look for something new.

I quickly discovered Brizzly on TechCrunch. I’ve been using Brizzly for Twitter reading for about a week now, and although I miss a couple features from Tweetlens, I don’t think I will be going back.

First off, @Brizzly just looks a lot nicer and more polished. I may not be able to mark items as read, but the site tells me when there are more tweets to download, then after I retrieve them they are highlighted in yellow.

Brizzly allows me to quickly and easily switch between multiple accounts.

I can create groups of tweeps. Handy for getting common topics together. What I also discovered is that you can add people you don’t follow to a group. There are some people I like checking in on once in a while, but they tweet too much to follow them. I have a group for people just like this.

When scrolling down through the tweet list, they have a never ending scroll feature that is just awesome. When you reach the end, the page requests the next set of tweets and displays them inline. I don’t have to click a link to refresh the list.

Their DM’s are more like IM’s which is cool too. Url’s are auto expanded for you, twit pics and youtube video’s are displayed inline, you can save draft tweets, you can mute people, and more. Read their help page for a better list of features. Also, Brizzly uses OAuth for authentication, so you never have to give them your password.

Downside is that they are still in Beta, and you need an invitation code. Mine arrived a couple days after requesting it. They also seem receptive to suggestions and bug reports which is nice.

Overall my switch to Brizzly has been a good one.