September 2010
2 posts
Big news! Thing Labs is merging with AOL!
We are pleased to announce that as of today, Thing Labs is merging with AOL. This deal has been in the works for a little while, and we’ve been dying to tell you all, but today it’s official!
First things first: Brizzly is sticking around. Of course anything can happen in the future, but nowhere on our list of things to do is there a “KILL BRIZZLY” item. For more info about this and other...
New Brizzly features: new posting form, Foursquare...
We updated Brizzly with several new features today! Check ‘em out:
New posting form
We’ve moved the posting form away from the top of the screen, into the top of the left-hand navigation so it can be accessed from any Twitter screen. We also added easy access to your drafts and Brizzly photos while posting.
Foursquare
See your friends’ Foursquare check-ins from within...
August 2010
2 posts
Update to Brizzly for iPhone
Thanks to everyone who’s downloaded and used our iPhone app. We’ve just released Brizzly for iPhone v1.1 (called “Brizzly for Twitter” in the iTunes App Store), featuring the following bug fixes:
Avatars load correctly in iOS 4.0.x
Fix for stale/old tweets in timeline on initial load
Fixed problems when rotating the in-app browser
Removed account selector from posting...
Brizzly Guide video introduction
We’ve told you about Brizzly Guide before, but a picture is worth 1,000 words, and a video is worth roughly 1,000 pictures (depending on your screen resolution). So enjoy our million-word explanation of Brizzly Guide here:
July 2010
1 post
Brizzly Picnics: something different (and better)
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...
June 2010
2 posts
WordPress.com acquires Plinky
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...
Brizzly Pics: Celebrity Edition
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...
May 2010
1 post
Brizzly shirts available now
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!
April 2010
1 post
More new features: camera control, themes, emoji...
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...
March 2010
3 posts
Big news: Brizzly Guide, iPhone app and more!
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...
Brizzly Guide, Brizzly for iPhone reviewers' guide
About this Brizzly release
We’re announcing several new developments by Thing Labs:
Brizzly Guide
Brizzly for iPhone (and Birdfeed acquisition)
WikiRank acquisition
Brizzly Guide
Topic pages
Visiting brizzly.com/guide will show you the top 10 trending news topics in the left-hand column, with a sample topic description shown. Click the title of any topic to be taken to a topic page. ...
Featured Brizzly Pic(s): @Factory20
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...
January 2010
3 posts
Brizzly and Tornado Web Server
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,”...
MLK
Happy Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. at a 1964 press conference
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,...
Crunchies and Shorties
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,...
December 2009
1 post
Recent feature round-up
Our engineers work pretty darn hard here at Thing Labs (sometimes they even pause to sleep). As such, we’ve had some great features launch over the last month, some of which may have slipped by you, or if you’re me, you’ve already taken for granted. Here’s a reminder of the Brizzly features we’ve pushed out in the last month:
Lists Groups was one of Brizzly’s...
November 2009
3 posts
Brizzly now open to the public (and other big...
As of today, Brizzly is open to anyone – no invitation code required any more! We’ve had a great couple of months since we first launched to a small group of friends, and we want to take this opportunity to thank all of you who have tried Brizzly to this point and given us your honest feedback on the product (or simply continued using it). We love what we do and we’re happy to be able...
Good news about groups!
As of today, any groups you create in Brizzly are now synced with Twitter lists (a new Twitter feature similar to Brizzly’s groups). We took your existing Brizzly groups and converted them to Twitter lists. We now show you these and any existing Twitter lists in Brizzly. Important things to know:
We’ll show you up to three of your lists in the left-hand menu. To see more, click...
Facebook in Brizzly
Did you know that Brizzly now works with Facebook? You can view your Facebook news stream just like you view a Twitter account in Brizzly. To add a Facebook account, just go to Settings > Facebook and click “Add a Facebook account.” Just like with Twitter accounts, we’ll expand short links, images, videos and maps inline. And in addition to your standard news feed,...
October 2009
3 posts
Brizzly trend style guide
Our “trends and news” feature is some users’ favorite part of Brizzly – explanations of the top ten trending topics from Twitter. What you might not realize is that you can contribute or edit those descriptions yourself – just click the “explain this trend” (or “Be the first to explain this trend”) link on any topic, and make your contribution. While...
Tell us what Brizzly merch should look like (and...
One piece of feedback we’ve heard over and over again from Brizzly users is “OMG YOUR BEAR IS SO CUTE I LOVE HIM!!!” (One person even proposed marriage, but alas, it wasn’t in the cards.) We agree – he’s pretty darned cute. Here’s a little bit about him:
Name: Phineas T. Brizzly Gender: male Age: unknown Birthplace: Lolo National Forest, Mont. Education: B.A....
New user profiles
Since we first invited people to start using Brizzly, we’ve been getting the question, “Where’s the lists of my followers and the people I’m following?” Until now, we had to say, “Nowhere.” This weekend, though, we rolled out new user profiles and…wait for it…your follower/following lists! To see your profile, click the new...
September 2009
3 posts
New product: Let's Be Trends (a trend API)
We’re launching a brand new service that expands upon the trend explanations that have been native in Brizzly since we started out. It’s called “Let’s Be Trends,” and it’s an API that allows developers to use our user-supplied, user-edited trend explanations in their apps.
If you’re a software developer interested in having trends and news in your app,...
New: user-to-user invitations
Good news: If you’re a current Brizzly user, we’ve enabled invitations in your account: look under the “Trends and news” bar in the right-hand navigation column. Go tell your friends how much you love Brizzly (and we’ll tell ours how much we love you). Also, we made a new introductory video, which is in HD and is a bit more detailed and easy to see than our previous...
New feature: Brizzly Pics
For a few weeks now, our new product Brizzly has been in private beta, and reactions have been more positive than we ever could have expected. (Haven’t had a chance to check it out? Watch this handy video for an overview.) Today, we’re happy to announce a new feature for Brizzly: photo upload with Brizzly Pics. Sharing photos on Brizzly is easy: just click the camera icon found under...
August 2009
4 posts
Brizzly reviewer's guide
About Brizzly
Brizzly is a new web-based social media reader. It currently works with Twitter and Facebook, and adds cool features like:
inline display of video, images and maps
lists (a.k.a. “groups”)
multiple account support
multiple drafts
muting
trending topics with context
About the Team
Brizzly is built and maintained by the six-person team at Thing Labs, Inc. in San...
Brizzly top features
Take a peek at some of our favorite features of Brizzly.
What a day
We came in this morning to news that Twitter had been hit with a “denial of service” attack, causing our thing to, you know, not work that well. Additionally, we experienced some hiccups of our own. We’re working on those as we speak, but the following things may still be true until further notice: If you’re a current user, things might be slow. If you’ve got an...
Want to try out Brizzly?
We’d love to have you use Brizzly! Go to brizzly.com and submit your email address. We’ll send you an invitation as soon as we’re ready for you.
June 2009
1 post
2 tags
Announcing Thing Labs, Inc.
The company formerly know as Plinky, Inc. has some big news to share:
We’ve got a new name While Plinky is still the name of our beloved content-encouragement site, we’ve decided to change the name of the company to Thing Labs.
We’ve got a new VP of technology Chris Wetherell has joined us as our vice president of technology. Chris worked with Jason on Google Reader and...