Thing Labs, Inc.

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 earliest features, but when Twitter rolled out its lists system, we wanted to support it. We figured we’d better make the transition smooth, which was tricky! It all worked out, though and any lists you create on Brizzly sync with Twitter lists (and vice versa).

Translation
See a tweet in a language you don’t read? Hover over it and click the question mark to see an automatic translation. (Clicking the question mark for tweets in your native language will still show you additional information about the tweet and its author.)

For example, this tweet…

…can be translated like this:

Temporary themes
For the release of “New Moon,” we (well, Chris) decided it would be neat to provide a little extra something for those Brizzly users who were excited about the film. Typing #Jacob or #Edward into the update box brings your choice of oft-shirtless male vampire to the Brizzly interface.

Auto-suggest @replies
From the beginning, many users asked for the usernames of the people they follow automatically suggested as they type a username in an update. This week, we turned on that feature, so as soon as you type “@” and a letter, we’ll suggest people to automatically complete the reply.

All that and we opened our beta to the public too, so tell a friend about Brizzly! Big thanks to those users who have suggested and requested features – we’re happy to hear your thoughts on our contact page or on Twitter @brizzly (use this link if you’re logged into Brizzly).

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 to share it with even more of you. (We’ll still be in beta for a bit, which just means we’ll be continuing to experiment as usual.)

As if that weren’t big enough news, there’s more. First, we’re welcoming Ben Darnell to the team. Ben comes to us from Facebook, where he was working after the company acquired FriendFeed. Prior to that, Ben was an early Googler and founding member of the Google Reader team (where he worked with our own Chris Wetherell, Dolapo Falola and Jason Shellen). Ben will do amazing things with us, working to begin our efforts in a much larger framework for communication and content discovery. This will include a built-out infrastructure, APIs and more. In other words, this is a huge addition to our engineering team! Welcome, Ben.

Additionally, we’ve introduced a new feature: on-the-fly translation of tweets. Whenever you see a Twitter update in a language different from your default language in Brizzly, click the “?” next to the star icon in any tweet and we’ll show you a translation (courtesy of Google Translate).

Thanks for helping make Brizzly great, now go tell a friend about Brizzly!

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 “All lists.”
• Any changes you make to lists on Brizzly (renaming, adding or removing members, deleting, creating, etc.) will be reflected on Twitter and vice versa.
• You can create up to 20 lists, and each list can have up to 500 people on it.
• If you don’t see the lists conversion in your account, log out of your account and log back in.
• In order to make room for lists, we moved your pictures and drafts links to tabs at the top of your timeline. We also removed the link to your favorites (to see them, just go to your profile and click “favorites” there).

Enjoy!

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, we’ll also show you “Recent Activity,” which is just the posts that you’ve liked and commented on, and posts of yours on which your friends have done the same. Here’s what it looks like:

Check it out, and as always, let us know what you think.

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 some folks enjoy the goofier explanations that show up there from time to time, our goal is for that section to be more informative and useful than funny (though those things aren’t mutually exclusive). To help you strike the right tone and provide other Brizzly users with great explanations, we put together some tone, style and usage guidelines that you can view here:

http://brizzly.com/trends_style_guide

Are Twitter trends not really for you? We’re working on making that section of the site even more useful to everyone – rest assured that you’ll see some changes there in the future that you’ll probably like.

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. Psychology from University of Illinois at Chicago
Current location: San Francisco, Calif.
Twitter username: @phineasbrizzly

We’d like to make some shirts with Phineas on them, and we want your opinion about what they should look like, as well as what other Brizzly merchandise, if any, you’d be interested in owning. Please fill out this very quick survey, and we’ll love you forever:

http://bit.ly/brizzlymerch

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 “Profile” link from the left-hand sidebar. There, you’ll see the numbers of:

• people following you;
• people you follow;
• tweets you’ve marked as favorites;
• people you’ve muted.

Click one of those and we’ll show you the associated list. Here’s a “following” list:

Click a username on one of these lists to see that user’s profile within Brizzly. Click a user icon to be taken to that user’s Twitter page. Other users’ profiles show the same information as yours, except for who they’ve muted (as much as you may want to know if you’re on that list, we’re not going to tattle.) Check it out and give us your feedback on our contact page.

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, check it out:

http://letsbetrends.com

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 video. It also covers our new photo upload feature (and features some original music composed by yours truly).

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 the update field and choose a photo from your computer (jpg, jpeg, png or gif only, up to 10 MB). Once it uploads, we’ll auto-populate the update field with a link to the photo. You can add some text, or not, and update as you normally would. Brizzly users will see your picture inline:

…and everyone else will get a link to a page with the photo:

Enjoy, and as always let us know if you have questions, comments, feedback, etc.