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:
Phineas T. Brizzly
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:
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:
'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.
Let's Be Trends
If you’re a software developer interested in having trends and news in your app, check it out:
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:
Tweet w/Brizzly pic
…and everyone else will get a link to a page with the photo:
Brizzly pic
Enjoy, and as always let us know if you have questions, comments, feedback, etc.
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 invitation code to our beta and are having trouble completing signup, we’ve disabled signups while the Twitter issues get resolved.
We apologize for our little snags and, like you, await the resolution of the Twitter ones. Hang in there!
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 Blogger, and adds talent, leadership and a surprising amount of singing to Thing Labs.
We moved
While we liked our surroundings in our original Lafayette, Calif. office, we like our new ones in San Francisco’s beautiful Mint Plaza even more. There’s a Blue Bottle Coffee, great restaurants, orange chairs and a whole lot more. Our office itself is much more suitable for coding, writing, discussing, creating, blasting Lil’ Wayne, and all of the other things required to make great software.
We’re working on new things
Don’t worry – Plinky the product will continue to live on, providing inspiration for you to write and share content with the world. But we’ve been bitten by more than one creative bug lately, and we’re building some fun new things that we’ll be able to share with you soonish.
