Starting to mess around with Brizzly a bit.  I’ve never loved Tweetdeck, mainly because it’s a pain in the neck ti have another application to sift through on the desktop.  I had tried widgets and just depending on the actual twitter page, but the beauty of twitter is that it’s not about the page.  Indeed, the functionality of  Tweetdeck, running Adobe Air, is far beyond what can be done on the so-called twitter page.

So, he cool thing about Brizzly is that it’s not a separate application – it’s a webpage, reminiscent of a super-dumbed-down Facebook page.  Still no ads.  Very easy group management, including new group formation and simple add/remove options for all ‘friends’.

But the Twitter page stuff is here too, but enhanced.  Trends each have their own ‘why’ function – which is actually now available at your Twitter page.  But a Twitter page does not have built-in instant messaging that even allows for a Google-chat style conversation.

Brizzly has a way to go.  There is no customization of the user’s home page and you can’t access a list of your followers or who you are following.  That wouldn’t be such a problem if you could get to a Twitter page in another browser tab, but you can’t.  It seems that working in Brizzly locks you out.  That’s a big difference compared to something like Blip.fm, where you can have several windows open at once.  I realize that’s all within one web app, so maybe the issue is on Twitter’s end, but it’s no problem to have a Twitter page and Tweetdeck open at the same time.

One other early impression is that the group management system is nice and simple, but doesn’t go far enough.  I would like to be able to highlight certain groups (as I can now) but also exclude certain groups, basically a filter that lets me save values.

In following certain Blip.fm DJs on Twitter (which is highly recommended) I notice that my ‘in-box’ is almost always full.  I imagine others who follow several thousand accounts must exponentially larger problems.  The answer is to be able to make a defined group or set of groups disappear with the click of a link.  Allowing the user to see only the most important messages.

You can do this now if you think about your Twitter in-box in groups or categories whose importance is arranged from top down.  But that’s not how I classify the accounts that I follow.  There are music feeds, news feeds, personal friends and family members, people I follow from Blip and random follows that I have had interest in along the way.  It’s easier for me to group out things that I don’t want to look at.

But all this may be part of the premium service that is being offered to help convince Twitter’s high clientele that they should pay huge sums for monthly service.

So, Brizzly is nice.  I;ve only just started messing with it, but I’m impressed by the  interface.  Photos and videos are embedded right in the timeline – which is terrific to look at.  I’d like to see a built-in bt.ly resource, or something like it.  Tweetdeck’s automatic service is really nice.  But photo upload is just the same and it seems to work just as well.  And the ‘mute’ button is helpful for temporarily suppressing the tweets from a particular user.

Best thing to do is play with it for a while.  See if (maybe) more features come along.  See if (when) another interface by a competitor comes along.