Because I’m a Plinky user (and by user I mean that I have an account but only occasionally check the weekly prompts email and have never actually answered a prompt) I was offered an invitation to try Think Labs’ new social content offering Brizzly. At the risk of oversimplifying the concept of Brizzly, it basically takes your Twitter timeline and expands all of the shortened URL’s into their original URL (including loading any links to images and videos and allowing you to view them inline with the rest of the tweet). There are also some other features like grouping of users that you follow and creating a “chat interface” out of the direct message protocol in Twitter.
My first reaction to this service is that it is basically taking the twit out of twitter. But the really weird thing is that I like it. Before I go on, let me first interject with a couple of key points regarding my credentials on this topic: 1) I’m not an avid Twitterer, as in I don’t tweet much more than twice a month and I don’t follow more than 6 people (if it’s even that many) 2) I’ve been a Brizzly user long enough to watch the demo video and login to my newly minted account and 3) My web interaction/experience is only just now starting to creep back up to my pre-graduation levels.
Expansion
So now that we’ve got that out of the way let me get back to Brizzly. First of all, I like that it allows you to view your timeline without all of the shortened URLs. I don’t know if I’m in the minority here, but I’m the kind of guy that likes to have the Status Bar up in my browser window so I know where a link is taking me when I hover over it. It just seems weird in that it seemed like (at first but maybe not as much now that it has evolved) the point behind Twitter was to keep everything short and sweet. In a way it’s like saying the blogosphere in general was too verbose so we shifted to Twitter, but Twitter was too succinct so now we’ve got Brizzly. It’s like we’re making our way around the dinner table, but the porridge still ain’t right. (And maybe I’m a little short on my research, but isn’t this the space that Tumblr was trying to occupy?)
Chat
First I was an ICQer. Then I followed all of my friends to AIM. Now I”m exclusively a G-man with Google Chat. It’s an interesting concept to overlay chat onto the Twitter framework (can we even call it a framework? Is that what it’s become now?) but I don’t think I’ve really hashed my feelings out on this one yet. I think it’s going to take a certain level of adoption for me to really get down to my true feelings on this one (including convincing more of my friends to jump on the Twitter bandwagon).
Groups
This feature sits right up there with inline videos/images as what I’m most excited about with Brizzly. A couple of organizations that I started following recently tweet a lot more than I anticipated and I’m a little annoyed that they’re “spamming” my timeline. Ok so if it really was spamming, I would just stop following. But I am somewhat interested in the content so I don’t want to get rid of it altogether. So I like the idea of being able to group users so that I could more accurately match what I’m reading with what I’m really interested in reading rather than being forced to weed through it all. Clearly I have become a product of the RSS generation. Ironically, I think this will actually lead to me “following” more people because it will allow me to follow more efficiently by focusing on what I really want to know at any particular moment (i.e. do I want to check out the latest news, do I want to know how far away friends are doing, or do I want to know how the environment’s doing?).
What intrigues me most about Twitter is the founders’ almost hands-off approach to developing a technology or idea without a clearly defined purpose and then allow the users to define its purpose – or in Twitter’s case its purposes. Sure it might have delayed their ability to outline a clear monetization plan. But by allowing the service to evolve in to many things for many users, the paths to monetization may have cleared exponentially. Brizzly is not about de-twittering. It’s about Twitterization.
I “tweet” you on that.