Brizzly improves web interface before Twitter*

In spite of the increasing competition from the new Twitter web interface, the third-party clients are still alive and well, adding their ideas to the Twitter ecosystem. Today my favorite Twitter client, Brizzly, released an update with an impressive – and much awaited – set of improvements. Like other much more notorious bloggers, I started to write about it on Google Buzz, but soon I began discovering other small changes and switched to a full blog post; besides, Brizzly deserves one.

Battle of the Twitter beasts

With the world gradually moving towards the cloud, not only for storage or applications, but entire operating systems, it’s about time Twitter clients also broke free from the desktop and lived entirely on the web as applications inside browser windows. Lately, web-based Twitter clients have been evolving at a faster pace, introducing more and more new features to match wider-used desktop clients. Three of them usually get the most attention, and incidentally they all have animal logos: the Brizzly bear, the HootSuite owl and the Seesmic racoon. Over time I have tried them all, as prefer not to install a desktop app just for Twitter. This is how they compare in terms of features and interface.

Web-based alternatives for the Facebook interface

Everybody these days seems to compare Facebook to Twitter in terms of growth or features. But there is one area where the difference between them is huge: the third-party clients. While Twitter users have dozens, if not hundreds of applications to choose from, both for desktop and on the web, Facebook only has a handful. In this article I will focus on the web-based clients that can be used to access your Facebook updates.

As far as I know, Brizzly was the first Twitter client to integrate the Facebook stream. Since it’s my favorite Twitter client, I also tied it to my Facebook account. At first there were some problems displaying the updates, like posts missing or Facebook failing to load altogether, but that seems to be mostly fixed by now.

My tech wishlist for 2010

As the year draws to a close, everybody (more-or-less) reviews the past year and launches predictions for the next. I don't think I'm qualified to make predictions and if I did, they will probably fail miserably. So I will just list a couple of features I would like to see in the applications I use most often:

Brizzly integrates Twitter lists

My favorite Twitter client, brizzly, finalized the integration of the new Twitter lists today, as promised a month ago. After the initial announcement in the morning (at least in my time zone), the process was completed in the afternoon, when I logged into the app. Only a week has passed since the lists were officially rolled out to all the twitter users worldwide. From the countless clients you can find on the web, brizzly is second only to Seesmic Desktop to support the new lists and most likely the first among the web-based clients.

Brizzly – a better Twitter

Dozens or perhaps hundreds of Twitter clients populate the Internet these days and more of them launch every week. Although brizzly is still an invite-only beta product, it stands out in this crowd with the best combination of features and user interface I have seen so far. I discovered it through Google Reader, where Louis Gray mentioned it in one of his articles and offered 150 invites for this new webapp. I used one of the invites and it impressed me so much, it became my twitter client of choice ever since.