The Battle for Tweet Dashboard Supremacy: Brizzly versus Br.st

Written by Dana Oshiro / November 17, 2009 6:08 PM / 9 Comments

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In late August Br.st was nothing more than a URL shortener service with link stats and malware filters. While the company allowed users to cross post to social networks like Twitter, Myspace and Digg, it was simply too late to the space to be considered a contender. As of today the caterpillar has transformed into a butterfly. Br.st is spreading it's new wings with a slew of features and instead of resembling Bitly, it's looking a lot closer to the current social media reader of choice Brizzly.

Br.st offers the basic features of Brizzly including the ability to edit your status, view your Twitter feed, direct message friends, retweet great content, view trending topics and save searches. But where Brizzly also incorporates Facebook statuses, Br.st forgoes Facebook and concentrates on its URL shortener roots. The company does a great job of ensuring against malware through inline link, image and video previews.

Additional key features include:
1. GeoTags: Images with geotags are automatically displayed alongside a map of their location
2. Text Shortener: Br.st automatically reduces your word count with Twitter shorthand ("2" for too, "u" for you)
3. Image Upload: You can upload images and files up to 10MB each
4. Commenting: Users can comment on your images and files
5. Analytics: In addition to real-time links on your stats you can also set up Br.st to notify you every time a person leaves a comment or downloads your files
6. Follow: The service allows you to find people and instead of scrolling through people you can search for a person and either unfollow them or add/remove them from a list.
7. Conversations: Users can create conversation threads around a specific message and keep all of those replies in one place.

While there's a great deal of overlap between Brizzly and Br.st, the two companies are clearly close competitors. Test Br.st by registering here and let us know your favorite Twitter tool in the comments below.

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Comments

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I hate the idea of the text shortener. Ick. I don't want my words changed into numbers... it makes me feel like a teenager.
Although I like the analytics aspect of br.st, I would rather have the added facebook bonus of Brizzly.
Brizzly gets my vote.
Now if only one would incorporate some decent listening/monitoring tools, it would be so lovely.

Posted by: Jordan Miller | November 17, 2009 7:00 PM

I don't know about the text but I think they have the right idea..

Posted by: Irish Outlaw | November 17, 2009 7:15 PM

Br.st is what Twitter.com should be feature-wise, but Brizzly is more immediately usable, in my opinion, and seems to handle multiple accounts more greater ease. Being web clients, neither one is going to pry me away from Tweetie for Mac any time soon.

Posted by: segdeha.com | November 17, 2009 7:16 PM

One good reason to not use it:

"Br.st automatically reduces your word count with Twitter shorthand ("2" for too, "u" for you)"

Please, let's desecrate the English language a little more...

Posted by: Thom Cummings | November 18, 2009 1:44 AM

It is visually appealing. And I agree with @thom and @jordan that auto text shortening is a negative. I do it myself from time to time to fit the 140 character limit, but only if necessary!

Posted by: Eric | November 18, 2009 6:19 AM

Brizzly is killer and I'd have to agree w/what Jordan is saying as far as the analytics. I use tr.im as my url shortener and getting stats and even searching for url's I shared, is really easy.

To each his own I guess...

Posted by: Mike Stenger | November 18, 2009 9:05 AM

thanks admin
information is the most beautiful treasures

Posted by: 3d oyunlar | November 19, 2009 12:26 AM

The link in the last paragraph "Test Br.st by registering here..." is broken. It should be http://br.st

Posted by: TJ | November 19, 2009 2:44 AM

Br.st has some delightful features, such as maintaining one's twitter theme and the ability to upload files. Clicking on the link to open the files, takes one first to br.st, unfortunately, but it's an interesting idea.

Br.st does seem a little buggy at present though - it gave me several error screens. Brizzly is snappier. In particular, when scrolling to the bottom of the page, it loads older tweets automatically, without having to request that.

Posted by: howard shippin | November 22, 2009 2:24 PM