The Twitter Bird is now a Bear/Grizzly

There are hundreds, even thousands of Twitter clients out there. But most of the people still use the twitter.com website to update their tweets.
A new and in private beta testing mode Twitter client is “brizzly” and it offers some nice features for Twitter users.
The general user should be understanding the website quiet fast. The interface is very simple and light. The input area is bigger than the one of Twitter and has more buttons.

The draft button saves your text for later editing. The photo camera icon opens a file dialog which allows you to upload a picture to brizzly.com and adds an URL to the picture to your tweet.
This is also something brizzly does for tweets. If a person tweets an image or a video on YouTube, it is embedded directly and you do not need to browse away from your stream.
Something I find particularly good is that brizzly changes its title tag and adds an asterisk (*) if there are new tweets to read. So you can keep a tab on brizzly and write a blog post or read an online article and change to brizzly if a new tweet came in.

Same as the original twitter website, you have different options to navigate.
The @cocaman link displays all tweets mentioning you username (as expected), favorites displays your favorite tweets. New is the drafts and pictures links. The first shows tweets you have stored and not yet published. The later displays all the pictures you have uploaded to brizzly.

Another great feature is the “groups” section. You can create your own groups and add users to it.

If you click now on one of your groups, you only see the tweets of people in your group.

This really is helpful to follow your friends. The same goes for saved searches, that only display tweets from your followers that match your search.

To add a person to your group you simply click on the profile icon and select “Add to Group”. Easy 🙂

Something I always wanted for Twitter is some sort of “muting” or “hiding” of an user or a hashtag. With brizzly you can mute an user while still officially following him or her.

My feature request is to have the option to mute a topic or hashtag.

Which brings us to the last feature of brizzly I want to report. The trends and topics. This is something very important on Twitter. And brizzly puts a lot of weight in it. What brizzly does different from twitter is that they explain a topic. You can simply click on the topic and a text shows why this is trendy. Those texts are entered by users and therefor should be very relevant to the actual topic.

You can also add another twitter account and tweet from different accounts. I think this is one of the first websites that allow this.

I will give Brizzly a few days to see how good it fits my twitter-client-needs and maybe I switch from the twitter.com website over to it.