I love Twitter, but sometimes feel I need a few more features than it offers. Brizzly fills the gap by providing an enhanced Twitter experience in your browser, and it’s got one other useful trick - the ability to manage multiple Twitter accounts. I put it to the test.

Adding Accounts To Brizzly

I started by adding the three Twitter accounts I manage. To do this, I had to login to each of them on the main Twitter page and then connect them to Brizzly through OAuth - it was simple and quick and I was soon able to navigate to the Brizzly home page.

The left column has links to your profile, mentions, favorites, drafts and pictures (you can use Brizzly to upload photos to Twitter). Further down are links to your DM inbox and sent message, then to groups, then to saved searches (which automatically sync with your Twitter account, no matter where you create them. The saved searches are highlighted in bold if there are new tweets.

Cool Features

The groups are a cool feature similar to the lists that Twitter is beginning to roll out. Just give your group a name, then type the names of people you want to add into a box. It’s a quick way to filter the Twitter noise. Groups are accessible to all the Twitter accounts you manage, which is very useful.

On the right there’s a box at the top where you can keep track of direct message conversations, above another box covering trends. These are the same as the Twitter trends, but with the added Brizzly feature of explaining why they are trending.

Managing Your Twitter Stream

At the top of the centre column is a search box, then avatars for each profile that you manage, then a box for your tweets and your Twitter stream. There are more great features here. Brizzly automatically shortens URLs and will take this into account when telling you how many characters are left. You can save draft tweets (but not schedule them yet). Within your Twitter stream, Brizzly automatically decodes shortened URLs and provides inline views of photos and videos.

Click on someone’s avatar to bring out a menu that reveals their Twitter profile and allows you to follow/unfollow or message them. It also has a mute button which is useful when someone you want to follow happens to be tweeting about something that doesn’t interest you. You can manage people you have muted in the settings panel.

Brizzly - Simple And Effective

If you are used to a multi-column Twitter account manager like Hootsuite, Tweetdeck or Seesmic, Brizzly’s multiple account management interface may not work for you. However, I love its simplicity - click on the avatar to switch to an account and your tweets automatically come from that account.

Brizzly is still in beta and there are a few issues to work on. Your stream doesn’t refresh automatically and if you leave the web page open for a long time, the site can slow down. That said, Brizzly is the longest lasting of the Twitter interfaces I’ve tried and with Facebook integration being rolled out, it will be around for a while.

This post was submitted by Sharon Hurley Hall from Get Paid To Write Online.com.
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