Thing Labs, Inc.

It would be pretentious to call Brizzly Picnics revolutionary. We risk selling ourselves short if we call it a group chat interface. Somewhere in the middle is the truth: Brizzly Picnics are a new way of sharing with the people you know.

You know as well as we do that there are a lot of ways to share information online these days. Twitter, Facebook, blogs, email, Skype and countless others provide many opportunities for this kind of thing. So why build a new one?

Because it’s better. How?

Brizzly Picnics are easy
A picnic is a simple, casual place to have lightweight conversations and share things (a photo, video, link, comment) with your friends, family or coworkers.

Brizzly Picnics are fun
Photos, videos and tweets automatically show inline, making for a great reading experience. Videos play right inline, so you don’t have to click away. A good picnic feels like a great dinner party (only you can show people that YouTube clip instead of describing it).

Brizzly Picnics are private
You choose who’s in your picnic. There’s a list of who’s there, so there’s no surprises. There’s no need to worry about fiddling with privacy settings.

You can have a different Brizzly Picnic for every group that matters to you
Have one picnic for your family, one for your close friends, another for your softball team – don’t worry about whether or not EVERYONE will find your latest link interesting.

What are you waiting for? Go start a picnic now!

The Thing Labs team is excited to announce that our friends at Automattic, makers of WordPress.com, are the proud new owners of Plinky! We’re happy to hand off Plinky to a company that knows and loves the world of blogging and content creation.

When we launched Plinky as “a service that makes it easy for you to create inspired content on the web” we had high hopes and quickly gained many faithful daily contributors. We’re eager to see how Plinky can continue to inspire in the days to come.

Not only are we excited that the original idea will live on in some form with people we trust, but it means we at Thing Labs can continue to focus on Brizzly, which lets you talk and share with the people important to you.

We’re proud of what we built with Plinky, and we’re glad it can continue to exist in some form at WordPress.com.

Why who’s this handsome gentleman sitting in the lap of this other gentleman?

Why, it’s Ashton Kutcher, who snapped this pic of himself and David Letterman when he was on “The Late Show” recently, and posted it…to Brizzly! Personally, we’re Letterman kind of people around here, so when our man Ashton got a Brizzly screenshot on the late-night king’s show, we were ever so proud. See the clip here:

A common question we hear when people lay eyes on our mascot, Phineas T. Brizzly, is “OMG DO YOU HAVE SHIRTS?” Until now, we had to say, “No.”

Now we’re able to say a proud and excited “Yes!” Head to the Brizzly Gear shop to get your very own Brizzly shirt today!

More Brizzly goodness comes your way today with the following new features:

Camera control
Take pictures with a built-in or USB webcam (like Apple’s iSight) and post with Brizzly. Click the camera icon to try it. You can even zoom in and apply color filters or crazy effects!

Themes
You might notice that things look a little different around here. For starters, we’ve updated the default theme to a nice blue one that we think is a little easier on the eyes. Go to your settings page for three other options – let us know what you think!

Emoji
Along with the new themes comes emoji! Sometimes words alone cannot express the sentiment you’re trying to convey…but a smiley with hearts for eyes can convey that sentiment perfectly. (Emoji is the Japanese term for picture characters. They can be seen on Brizzly and in mobile devices like the iPhone, but may not show on Twitter’s website or in Facebook yet.)

iPad interface
You can use the Brizzly iPhone app on your iPad, but for the best experience, we recommend simply visiting brizzly.com in Safari on your iPad. We’ve optimized the interface for maximum viewing and tweeting pleasure. (If for some reason you don’t like it, visit and bookmark http://brizzly.com/?ui=web and you’ll see the standard Brizzly web interface.)

There’s lots of big news in the world of Brizzly today. May we present to you:

Brizzly Guide
We’re launching the Brizzly Guide today, which expands on the trend explanations already shown in Brizzly by giving each topic its own page. Guide pages are permanent sources for up-to-date information on topics people are talking about. You can access these pages even after a topic is no longer showing in our top 10.

Brizzly for iPhone

Now the best way to view Twitter on the web is available as an iPhone app! This free app is available for download in the iTunes app store today. Brizzly for iPhone brings great features of ours like Twitter list support, media expansion, trends and news, and more to our favorite mobile phone. This application was made possible by our acquisition of Birdfeed, a fabulous Twitter client made by Buzz Andersen and Neven Mrgan. Download it and let us know what you think.

WikiRank
We’ve acquired WikiRank, the visualization web app for Wikipedia data, from our friends at Small Batch, Inc. This is a recent acquisition, so expect future releases to make use of WikiRank technology.

This has all taken a great deal of work, cooperation and time, and we’re incredibly proud and excited to announce them to you today. Please, as always, let us know what you think. If you have feedback, questions or you encounter problems, visit our help page to get in touch.

Around the office, one of our reliable sources of entertaintment is looking at searches for “brizzly” in our own app – partly for vain reasons, of course, but largely because we love seeing the resulting photos that have been posted through Brizzly. We call these Brizzly Pics (or sometimes BrizPics for short).

People use Brizzly to post photos, screenshots and images of all kinds of things. For example, @imabuddha recently shared a snap of some delicious looking potato skins he made, @phs_latin_short posted what is presumably a classroom doodle, and our friend @donald gave a preview of a gadget he’ll be reviewing for CNET. There are cats, dogs, utensil SNAFUs, questionable Amazon recommendations, and, of course, bees with Will.I.Am’s head.

We’ll be featuring other interesting Brizzly Pics as we find them regularly on this blog, so keep your eyes peeled. This week, take a look at this vintage furniture set, artfully photographed and shared by Washington, D.C.’s @Factory20:

Come across or upload an interesting picture on Brizzly? Email it to us: brizpic AT thinglabs DOT you-know-what.

For those of you who want to get a little insight into how we make Brizzly run, we’ve decided to start sharing occasional technical posts like this one, written by star engineer Ben Darnell. Enjoy!

Here at Thing Labs, we’re always looking for ways to improve the performance of Brizzly. One important technique for real-time communication in web apps is “long polling,” where a web server keeps a connection open with a client until it has results to send back. Unfortunately, this technique came around after most web frameworks were designed so they’re not built to handle gobs of simultaneous connections efficiently. Because of this, we were excited by the release of the Tornado web framework. Tornado was originally developed at Friendfeed and released as open source by Facebook, and was designed to support long polling efficiently. Since December, Brizzly has been running on Tornado, with a growing number of features taking advantage of Tornado’s long polling capabilities.

Brizzly started out using the Django framework, and most of our code is in fact still based on Django. We have been converting pieces of the site one at a time based on where Tornado can add the most value, and we expect the two frameworks to coexist in Brizzly for some time.

Along the way, we have made a number of improvements to Tornado, many of which make it easier to migrate from one framework to Tornado or mix two frameworks in one app. These changes are now available in the Tornado git repository and will be available in the next release. For more information, read this post by Bret Taylor, Facebook’s director of products.

Happy Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. We’re working today, but we couldn’t forget King’s legacy if we tried. Do yourself a favor, and if you ever find yourself in Memphis, visit the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel, the site of King’s 1968 assassination. It’s simultaneously sad and uplifting, and will hopefully leave you inspired.

(If you can’t make the trip, at least listen to or read King’s speeches and letters online.)

While we didn’t take home awards, we are honored to have been named as a finalist in two categories of the 2009 Crunchies, co-hosted by tech news sites GigaOm, VentureBeat and TechCrunch. We were in good company in both the “Best Social App” and “Best Design” categories, and were happy to see our competition be recognized Friday night.

Award season isn’t over, though. If you want to stroke our collective ego, you can nominate us for a Shorty award (if you’re into that kind of thing). To vote, visit http://shortyawards.com/brizzly (and be sure to read the Shorty interview with Brizzly) or simply tweet “I nominate @brizzly for a Shorty Award in #apps because…” and explain why. No pressure, but we appreciate your nominations!