For power users, the Twitter website is often just a thing of the past. We've moved on to third party interfaces with multiple columns, special user list navigation, search, and so on. But what about the novice user that wants something more than Twitter.com?
For that, there's Brizzly, a web-based Twitter client that today is announcing the release of its awaited iPhone app, along with a neat feature or two.
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The web-based version of Brizzly takes the Twitter stream and opens it up for the average user. It expands shortened links into full URLs, making it easier to know what you're clicking on, and turns links to YouTube videos or images into just that - embedded images and videos. In a way, it takes the guess work out of Twitter.
Today, the company is releasing a full-featured iPhone app that was built off of the skeleton of Birdfeed, the company acquired by Brizzly last fall. The app is a simple and doesn't offer some of the opening up of Twitter that you find on the website, but that would be difficult for an iPhone app to do, with it's limited real estate. Links are shortened and images hidden behind links, but that's as expected. Still, it handles multiple accounts, each of which you can view in its own stream. It also supports lists, mentions and DMs - all the standard stuff you would expect.
As we mentioned the last time we wrote about Brizzly, when the company added Facebook to its stream, the tool tries to make the experience of twitter simple for the non-geek. In that way, it interprets and explains Twitter Trends, the hashtags that are most popular at a given time. The Brizzly staff looks at hashtags and writes up a quick little blurb that explains what the Trends are that day and why. The iPhone app prominently contains these guides as a separate tab called "News".
Brizzly is expanding on this trend explanation feature with its launch of the Brizzly Guide on its website. The Guide gives each of these trends its own page, which is a "permanent source for up-to-date information on topics people are talking about," it says in its press release. In addition giving these explanations a permanent home, Brizzly has acquired WikiRank, a visualization web application based on Wikipedia data. It will be "integrating WikiRank technology into the Brizzly Guide" the company says in its press release. We can only wonder what will come of that, but it sounds interesting.
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