I was lucky enough to get an invite to Brizzly the other day and figured I’d share some initial thoughts.

Things I like

I love that URLs are spelled out in full and that pictures and video are already loaded and in your stream. For obvious safety reasons this is a huge win, but it’s also really convenient to instantly see what people are referring to in their tweets.

Explanation of trending topics is another cool feature that breaks down their meaning and also gives them context.

One click access to Facebook is great. It seems that – despite the rivalry – Twitter and Facebook are the peanut butter and jelly of social media right now. So being able to switch back and forth without leaving the page is nice. Plus Brizzly supports multiple Twitter accounts.

Saved searches, lists and the chat style direct message features make Brizzly a really robust service and don't force you to leave the site for a bunch of different services. Plus one of my favourite features – mute. When a bunch of your friends are at a conference and they’re all tweeting the same thing - just mute them for the day and you don’t have to be jealous have your timeline jammed with updates.

It’s web based so you can access it from any computer.

What needs improvement

It’s web based so it maybe isn’t as pretty and graphical as some of the Twitter clients (in fact it’s pretty plain). But that’s really an opinion thing, not a function thing.

It’s still buggy and slow. Sometimes it auto-refreshes other times not so much. But it is a beta (as far as I know) so I wouldn’t hold that against them.

Stuff I would like to see

Would love the option to quickly add users from the stream and would also love to be able to play songs via Blip or other online music services.