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.

The groups previously created with brizzly were converted to private lists, so the transition should be extremely easy for everyone. It’s nice that they also took the privacy of the users into consideration, by not making their groups public from the start. At the same time, the limitation of 5 groups per user was relaxed to match the Twitter constraints, i.e. no more than 20 lists and 500 people in each list.

The interface was also refreshed to accommodate these changes. The number of links in the left sidebar was reduced, the “Pictures” and “Drafts” were moved above the main timeline and there are only 3 lists directly available. They rotate over time and I’m not sure what criteria they use to select them. At first I thought that lists with the newest tweets get promoted to the sidebar, but now after some experiments I'm quite sure brizzly shows the lists you recently updated, e.g. by adding new people. This interface change could also be a response to users complaining in the help forum that they can’t access the saved searches, especially on small netbook screens. You can see and manage the former groups and the twitter lists from the new “All lists” link. Right now I have some duplicate lists, so a ‘merge’ option would be very useful.

So by now you are probably wondering: “What does brizzly offer in addition to the Twitter web interface?” Well, first of all it makes it easier to manage list members. Like before, clicking on an user avatar from the timeline brings up a menu allowing you to add or remove the user from any of your lists or to create new ones. From the list management screen you can easily remove people with only one click on the big pink button next to their names. And adding more members benefits from the auto-complete-enabled name search, as you can see below. If you have a lot of people to sort into lists you can do it a lot faster in brizzly and all the changes will be reflected instantly in your twitter account. Not to mention brizzly allows you to hide people from your main timeline, so you can follow their updates exclusively through the list. Brizzly should really add an option to mute an entire list, but until then you can create a (private!) list with the people you muted and check it from time to time.

Despite some bloggers questioning the long-term success of brizzly as twitter adds more features, it continues to draw more users and I have no doubt that the team will keep improving on the twitter experience and explore new grounds, like the recently launched Facebook integration.

Update: The web version of Seesmic also started supporting twitter lists today!