Thing Labs "the blog"

Brizzly is shutting the cave door

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 13:26:57 -0800

It’s never easy to be the bearer of bad news. Luckily, there’s plenty of good news along with it.

First: Brizzly is shutting down at the end of this month

I know this stands in stark contrast to the last post I wrote, wherein I said that “kill Brizzly” wasn’t on our “to do” list heading into our new roles at AOL. That statement still holds true, though. We didn’t plan to get rid of the service we spent the prior year or so building, but we knew there was a possibility it might not make sense to continue work on it. Sure enough, once we set to the task at hand—improving the hell out of AIM—we had little to no time to work on Brizzly, and it became clear that the new things we’re working on are far more worth our time and attention.

From the beginning, Brizzly was an experiment. We said, “Hey, what if there was a better way to view content from Twitter?” So we built the first version of Brizzly, adding link expansion, infinite scrolling, inline photo and video display, and many of the features that you Brizzly users know and love. Then we thought, “Hey, what if we did the same thing for Facebook?” Well, we tried that, anyway. Then Jason wanted to build on Twitter’s trending topics by adding user-submitted and -edited explanations, links and photos to the things people were talking about—a sort of “Wikipedia for right now.” Then we built Brizzly Picnics as a way to communicate amongst ourselves more easily, which we quickly decided was worth sharing with the world.

We had many more ideas of what Brizzly could be or do, but this experiment has run its course. The good news here, though, is that those ideas haven’t been locked away.

Last month, we released the next generation of AIM. While it doesn’t do the core thing Brizzly does (show you all of the tweets from people you follow), it does have vastly improved group chat with media expansion—a lot like Brizzly Picnics. It also tells you when people have mentioned, liked, followed, or commented on your Twitter, Facebook or Instagram content, or when you have new Gmail or AOL Mail messages.

We’re very fortunate to have had you as a fan and user, and we’re even more fortunate to be working on software that will incorporate many ideas we’ve had for how to solve existing communication problems.

We truly, gratefully appreciate all of the people who checked out Brizzly, and especially those of you who’ve grown attached to it and evangelized on our behalf. We built Brizzly for you, and we built the new and better AIM for you, too.

Our best advice from here on out is to find yourself a nice new Twitter client (Twitter itself has done some nice things), follow @aim on Twitter or like the AIM Facebook page, and wear your seat belt.

Sincerely,

Grant (and Jason and Zack)
Part of the Team Formerly Known as Thing Labs

Big news! Thing Labs is merging with AOL!

Tue, 28 Sep 2010 13:58:00 -0700

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 questions you might have, see our handy FAQ below:

Whoah, why are you selling to AOL?
Why not?!?! They have some great products, excellent brand recognition, and lots of people who are doing interesting things. This obviously gives us a boost in resources and huge opportunities to make the web even more awesome.

But that’s how my grandmother connects to the internet.
Well, thank goodness for them, then. How else would you get those pictures of dogs and cats doing adorable things or whatever?

Seriously, they have this cool product you’ve probably heard of called AIM. And a bunch of interesting websites (Engadget, Urlesque, TMZ, Joystiq, and many more) that you may or may not know are owned by AOL.

What will you be doing over there?
AOL has asked us to take on a couple of things, including heading up AIM and Lifestream. We’ll also continue working on Brizzly, including some version of Picnics and the Brizzly Guide.

What will happen to Brizzly?
Some or all parts of Brizzly will live on at AOL. One of the reasons we joined forces is that AOL recognized the great products we’d built and saw places where Brizzly, the Brizzly Guide and especially Picnics could tie in with some of their efforts.

What about the bear?
First of all, he has a name (Phineas.) We hope Phineas will stick around. He’s adorable. Plus he takes care of our office mouse problem.

Do bears really eat mice?
Yes. Phineas also likes Pop Chips.

Will you be staying in San Francisco?
Sometimes. AOL just moved most of its Bay Area operations to a fancy new space in Palo Alto, where we’ll spend most of our time. But we still have a lease on a place in San Francisco, and darned if we’re going to skip any opportunities to hang out on the roof deck.

Can I come work with you?
If you do cool things that line up with our needs, sure! Check out our jobs page to submit your information.

New Brizzly features: new posting form, Foursquare updates and more!

Mon, 27 Sep 2010 15:10:00 -0700

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 Brizzly. Just click the “more” link at the top of the page to add your Foursquare account info.

New camera control feature

By default, the webcam feature takes your picture and flips it around to the “right” way, but now you can flip it back if you want a mirror image.

Collapsible menus

If you have a lot of saved searches or Picnics, your navigation menu and the Trends & news section don’t stay in place when you scroll down the page (in the Twitter tab). Now, you can collapse any of the navigation sections on the left side of the screen by clicking on the title (i.e. “Picnics” or “Lists”). Just click again to expand.

Twitter-style retweets

Ever since Twitter announced its new retweet style last year, we heard a split response from users who wanted us to support this and users who liked “classic” retweets (as they became known). Today, we added the option to retweet via the new method, but you can still do a “classic” retweet by clicking “comment.” This allows you to edit the tweet as before. We’re still displaying retweets the way we always have.

Update to Brizzly for iPhone

Tue, 17 Aug 2010 14:44:20 -0700

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 form
Fixed font rendering when viewing individual tweets
Accounts for shortened link length in character counter
Fixed rendering of tweets containing long unbroken text
“Post” button deactivates when character count is -1 instead of 0

It’s still free, so update or download today and check it out!

Brizzly Guide video introduction

Mon, 02 Aug 2010 15:54:00 -0700

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:

Brizzly Picnics: something different (and better)

Thu, 08 Jul 2010 11:56:00 -0700

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!

WordPress.com acquires Plinky

Fri, 25 Jun 2010 13:03:24 -0700

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.

Brizzly Pics: Celebrity Edition

Tue, 15 Jun 2010 17:44:00 -0700

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.

Brizzly shirts available now

Fri, 07 May 2010 14:20:59 -0700

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 new features: camera control, themes, emoji and iPad view

Tue, 20 Apr 2010 16:26:00 -0700

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.)

Big news: Brizzly Guide, iPhone app and more!

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 11:47:00 -0800

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.

Brizzly Guide, Brizzly for iPhone reviewers' guide

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 01:55:00 -0800

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

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 18:02:05 -0800

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

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 11:04:49 -0800

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

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 14:47:00 -0800

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

Mon, 11 Jan 2010 14:32:30 -0800

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

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 07:00:00 -0800

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)

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 08:00:00 -0800

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!

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 13:17:00 -0800

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

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 14:27:00 -0800

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.