Thing Labs "the blog"

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. Each topic page contains:

• the name of the topic
• an explanation (or if new, a “be the first to explain this trend” button”
• related links
• topic photo(s)

All content on this page is user-contributed.

Editing an explanation Click “edit” or “be the first to explain” to edit the trend. We ask users to follow this style guide when writing descriptions. Add photos by clicking “Add a new photo.” You can search photos from Flickr’s Creative Commons pool, or link to a photo on the web. Links will be automatically added if you post them in the description.
Brizzly for iPhone

 Brizzly for iPhone is a feature-rich mobile app that syncs with Brizzly to bring multiple timelines, muted users, image previews, Brizzly Guide, Twitter lists and more together with iPhone enhancements such as “pull-down” refresh and customizable display. To complete this project, Thing Labs purchased the iPhone Twitter client Birdfeed and worked with the developer to release a new version as Brizzly for iPhone.

Getting Brizzly for iPhone
Brizzly for iPhone is available in the iTunes App Store. On your iPhone or iPod Touch, visit the App Store and search for “Brizzly.” On a Mac computer, you may do the same, or visit http://brizzly.com/iphone or this preview.

Connecting with Brizzly
The first time you open the app, you’ll be prompted either to connect with Brizzly or sign up for a free account. If you’ve got a Brizzly account, enter your Brizzly login information and the application will load your Twitter accounts.
Navigating in Brizzly for iPhone On first log-in, you’ll have five tabs available: Home, Mentions, News, Messages and More. Home shows the home Twitter timeline for your default Twitter account. Mentions shows @ replies to you. Messages shows sent and received direct messages. More is your link to important settings and options. Navigation is pretty intuitive – drag your timeline up and down to view tweets, pull down to refresh, and scroll down to your heart’s content – we’ll keep grabbing tweets for you to read.

To compose a tweet, tap the conversation bubble in the top right. Include a photo using our free photo hosting on Brizzly or a Flickr account – we’ll take care of shortening the URL automatically. You can also share your location if you’ve enabled the geolocation feature on Twitter.
Customizing the tab bar You can rearrange or replace these to suit your needs. Visit More > My Settings > Edit tabs to rearrange. You can replace any of these except “More” with search, saved searches or Twitter lists (automatically synced with your Twitter account). See even more information and screenshots at http://brizzly.com/iphone
 

Wikirank acquisition

Our friends at Small Batch, Inc. have made some great products in their short life as a company – so great that we’ve acquired Wikirank, a visualization app for Wikipedia data, from them. Wikirank displays which pages are popular and trending in a very simple, easy-to-understand interface. Small Batch shut down Wikirank a while ago (read more about it here), but we saw great potential to include the technology in our work. This is a recent acquisition, so expect to see it in future iterations of our products.

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 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.

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,” 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.

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, 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.)

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, 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!

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 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).

Brizzly now open to the public (and other big news)

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.)

(l-r, Phineas T Brizzly, Ben Darnell)

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!

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 “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!

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, 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.

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 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.