Is Brizzly Right for You?

Brizzly recently exited its beta period and is now available to anyone who wishes to use this service to manage Twitter and/or Facebook accounts. I've been using Brizzly for several weeks now. Overall, the service is fairly intuitive and fills a gap between feature-heavy Twitter apps like Tweetdeck and the simplistic, buggy Twitter.com web interface.

However, Brizzly isn't a silver bullet for Twitter or Facebook users. It has flaws--some of which can be very irksome--and it's lacking features that I'd include in my ideal Twitter application. I've analyzed both the good and the bad in this post. If you've tried Brizzly and have an opinion, please leave a comment!

What's Good About Brizzly

Brizzly allows you to manage all of your Twitter and Facebook accounts in a single browser tab. The user interface is similar enough to Twitter.com that even users who aren't especially tech-savvy will feel well-oriented within minutes. Adding a new account is (theoretically) easy, though one person I spoke with experienced multiple errors before successfully connecting a Facebook account to Brizzly. Once you've saved your account(s) to Brizzly, you only need to remember your Brizzly login and password to access everything.

Another handy feature is the absence of pagination in your Twitterstream while using Brizzly. As you scroll down, older Tweets will load automatically. You'll never need to click "next page" to view your followers, tweets, Twitterstream, saved searches or lists in Brizzly.

If you've ever followed a spam link in a Direct Message or Tweet without realizing what you clicked until too late, you'll appreciate that Brizzly un-shortens URLs in Tweets and messages. When you view a Tweet in your Twitterstream, you'll see full-length links that tell you exactly where you're going before you end up there. If you choose to retweet or tweet a link of your own, the URL will be automatically shortened for you.

You will also see videos and photos through your Brizzly Twitterstream without having to visit an outside link to a service like Twitpic or Youtube. If you want to attach a photo to your own Tweet, you can upload and post it in one step by clicking the button with an image of a camera, just to the left of "Update."

Finally, if you've had it with a particular friend's Tweets but don't want to unfollow them, Brizzly allows you to temporarily or permanently mute another user's Tweets. All the peace and quiet with none of the social stress of unfollowing someone.

What's Not So Good

As I said, I like Brizzly overall, but can I please get one thing off my chest?

Why on Earth would you make an application that allows users to use Facebook, but only the most stripped down, bare-bones version of Facebook imaginable? I understand that it's not really possible to play Facebook games outside Facebook (and really, the last thing I need is a Farmville addiction) but no groups? No causes? No fan pages?

If all you do on Facebook is update your status and comment on your friends' status posts, Brizzly can conveniently stuff that functionality into the same tab as your Twitter accounts while allowing you to manage multiple Facebook profiles if necessary. But if you are a full-blown Facebook addict, you won't get much of a fix through Brizzly.

One other thing: Error messages. I know the Fail Whale is generally Twitter's fault, not Brizzly's, but when using Twitter.com in one tab and Brizzly in another, I found that Brizzly was slower to update and experienced more errors. This may be a scaling problem, what with only recently leaving beta, but it's still annoying as all get-out.

Oh, and There's a Chrome Extension

Are you a Google Chrome user? If so, you can use Brizzly through its Chrome extension.

I prefer Firefox, so I don't have a review of this extension, but it's getting positive feedback through Twitter. Have you used Brizzly's Chrome extension? Please leave a comment and let me know if you liked it!

Final Words

I've enjoyed using Brizzly and I'll continue to do so. It's a convenient solution that's less labor-intensive than installing Tweetdeck on every one of the several computers I use. I enjoy the simple and attractive interface. However, I'm hoping that Brizzly's development team will concentrate some resources on making Brizzly faster and improving its Facebook function to include, at the very least, the ability to manage groups through Brizzly.