What is Brizzly?

Brizzly is a web-based Twitter client (with room for expansion) featuring in-line photos, videos, and maps, expanded links, groups, chat-like direct messages, multiple accounts, saved searches, and drafts.

How to get a Brizzly invite:

Leave a comment in this post with your email address and I’ll send one to you. Or, just search Twitter for Brizzly & you’ll see links with invite codes (watch out for spam!).

The Good

• You’ve got tweets: Indicators tell me when I have new @ and Direct Messages (DMs). I don’t have to refresh the screen because Brizzly does that by itself. Once the messsages are viewed the indicator turns off.
  
• Chat-style direct messages: Instead of trying to remember who said what last, direct messages are displayed in a chat-style format. Planning lunch during a conference call has never been easier.
  
• Expanded links: No more worries about whether I’m clicking on a real link or the latest virus/worm!
  
• Image, Video and Map Viewing: On one hand, I don’t have to click through to see an image on Twitpic, a Google map, or a YouTube video. On the other hand, I shudder to imagine what fun spammers would have with the feature. Oh, nudity.
  
• Drafts: Sometimes you have a great idea, announcement or question at 1am. Or you wrote something that’s too long and you just don’t feel like trimming it. Save it to your drafts for a later date:
  
• Handles multiple accounts: I Tweet for myself, my frozen food site (Heat Eat Review), and BayCHI. I appreciate having a single web-based interface for all of them.
  
• Saved Search: One of my favorite features of Tweetie (and now Brizzly) is saved search. The feature is excellent for conference attendees, people missing conferences, and folks who need to search for mispellings of a name.
  

The Bad

• Delete is Broken. Brizzly (like every other Twitter client out there) pretends that the delete function actually functions. It doesn’t work and it drives me crazy.
• How many characters are left? The replies functionality is lovely (reply right from your friend’s tweet!), but the part that tells me how many characters I have left is slightly maddening. What does ‘34 with links’ (as seen below) mean? Sometimes it works, but usually I go over my character limit, have to rewrite the tweet, then need to log in to the Twitter web interface and delete the old, incomplete tweet.
  
• Multiple accounts are separate…but groups are forever. The reason I lump Brizzly into the consumer category is that unlike Hootsuite and Tweetdeck, it can’t show me multiple accounts at one time. However, it does make me share my groups from one account to another. That’s right, no matter how many Twitter accounts I have, I only get 5 Brizzly groups (each with up to 50 people). Hey, it’s free.
• Group limitations: My groups are incomplete because adding folks to groups isn’t integrated into the timeline or user information. To add someone to a group, I first have to open the group, then type in names or I have to open a user’s profile and click the ‘Add to group’ button. I’d like to do this straight from my timeline, and I’d like my timeline to display the groups my users are a part of, that way I can say to myself ‘Hey, why isn’t Kate in my Usability group?’ and fix it right away. I’m interested in seeing how Twitter will implement groups.

The Interesting

• Loads new items on scroll-down: As soon as I scroll into the lowest portion of the page, Brizzly loads the next oldest set of Tweets. This feature’s been around for quite awhile Also, the loading is fast enough that it took me a couple tries to capture this screenshot.
  
• Trends and News: Brizzly lets you define (and submit your definition for) the Trends and News content on the sidebar. The trends come from from Lets Be Trends, an API developed by the folks at ThingLabs.
  

• Image Management: I just want one place to keep my pictures. I like that I can upload them (and view my entire history!) with Brizzly, but I’m tired of using a bunch of different services depending on the Twitter client.
• Adorableness! Yes, the folks who made Brizzly also made Plinky and the sites are barely on this side of twee. I’m not yet tired of the little bear in a bird suit.
• Quiet down folks: I’m attending Interaction ‘10 next year, but I won’t be at SXSW. And while I like the live reporting from great panels, I don’t need the SXSW after-party play-by-plays. Fortunately, I can mute the most talkative conference attendees as needed.

Tell me about it.

• Have you tried Brizzly?
• Are you game for a browser-based Twitter client?
• What features is Brizzly missing?
• Are there any features you’d like to see removed?
• Do you need a Brizzly invite?

Thinking about publishing an online magazine or newspaper? Starting a new way to gather and report news in a region? Then you’re probably considering the elements of your site. It’ll have a masthead (aka header), menus, headline, stories…and the publication date. Right?

Sort of.

This photo of a USA Today was taken on Thursday, September 24, 2009 – but the newspaper is dated Monday, September 21, 2009. Thanks to that date I know better than to buy this paper. The date isn’t there to tell me what day it is (though I admit that I’ve used a newspaper to figure out the date), it is there to tell me what day that document was published.

But for some reason, folks working on the web decided that showing today’s date (rather than the publication date) was the ideal way to indicate fresh content:

Displaying the day’s date on a website doesn’t guarantee the content is fresh. All it means is that you’ve got a bit of PHP or Javascript whiling away the time.

Are your users going to your site to see what day it is? No. Unless you’ve developed a dashboard (see iGoogle and My Yahoo) they’re going to your site to get the freshest information, whether its about User Experience Design or Hollywood gossip. If your front page isn’t updated on a daily basis, consider including the content’s publication date (or time) next to the headline:

What are some other ways designers can accurately display the publication date for content? Does it mean putting the date next to every article on a page or just stopping the over-reliance on javascript date snippets?