Currently Brizzly is in private beta, but ReadWriteWeb has scored 2000 invites for our readers to test it out! (see the bottom of this post for the code).

Features, Including New Facebook Support

Brizzly is a self-described "social media reader." It's a browser-based service, like Blogger.com. Today Brizzly added Facebook as the second service it supports, after Twitter. Facebook users will be able to view and update their status, wall posts, comments and likes using Brizzly.

Brizzly is similar to Twitter clients such as TweetDeck, Seesmic and PeopleBrowsr (not all of them currently support Facebook though). However power users won't see much reason to switch, as Brizzly doesn't have the advanced features of those products. And that's the point.

The feature set of Brizzly aims to make microblogging a simple and seamless experience for users. For example instead of having to click links to view media such as photos and videos, Brizzly puts those items inline in the user's stream. Another example: Direct Messaging via Twitter has a UI (user interface) very similar to Instant Messaging, which many mainstream users will be familiar with.

Brizzly in 2009 = Blogger in 2003

Brizzly shares much of the same philosophy as Blogger. It's simple to use and aims to make microblogging easy to understand and use by a mainstream audience. This seems like a great strategy. Back in 2003, blogging was at a similar stage in its adoption as microblogging is today - passionately used by early Internet adopters, but not fully understood by a wider audience.

The popular Twitter clients circa 2009 include TweetDeck, Seesmic and PeopleBrowsr. Those are great apps and no self-respecting Web geek would be caught without at least one of them. However it's unlikely that your brother or sister, let alone Mom or Pop, is using those products. Brizzly wants to be the service that introduces your family and friends to the world of microblogging and social media.

Jason Shellen, who RWW readers may also recognize as a creator of Google Reader, was at The ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit in October. Jolie O'Dell interviewed him about about filtration and discovery on the real-time web. Shellen mentioned that mainstream users probably won't use hashtags to tag their tweets. He noted (at about the 3 minute mark in the video) that "most people are not going to do that [hashtags], so it needs to evolve into a different type of filtration." One of Brizzly's goals is to make hashtags and other "geeky" social media concepts simple for mainstream users to understand.

Less Noise

Regular people often struggle to see the value in Twitter and other social media apps. Web app developers need to find ways to convince people that behind the noise of social media, there is tremendous value.

So how does Brizzly compare to the now Facebook-owned FriendFeed, an aggregation service that early adopters love but most others think is information overload? I spoke to Jason Shellen at the RWW Summit about that. He told me that Brizzly won't blend services together like FriendFeed. It will keep them separate (Twitter, Facebook, other services that are added over time), in order to maintain simplicity.

Conclusion

All in all, we're impressed by the vision of Brizzly and we think it has a good chance of hitting the same wide user base that Blogger.com so successfully tapped. It's fair to say that power users will probably be a little disappointed by Brizzly - but you're not the target audience.

INVITE CODE: ReadWriteWeb readers can access the private beta of Brizzly by signing up using the code "rwwsentme" or clicking here. There are 2000 invites available.

For those who are widely loved, you'll see this as a blessing. For those who are widely loathed, you'll see the full wrath of the internet in colorful cross-platform commentary. Echo further transcends existing commenting systems with the incorporation of HTML, photo and video. This appears to be a truly amazing tool for mash up contests, political debates and global events.

Loux said, "When Robert Scoble saw this his response was, 'blogging is back'." Scoble's own Building 43 project aggregates comments into the Community 43 page from various social media sources using hashtags. However, where Scoble's community dialogue gets buried as new media comes in, Echo produces a live feed that stays visible with the source material. Chris Saad, VP of Product Strategy and Community, said,"We look for links back to the source page inside tweets/FriendFeed etc and bring in the related conversation - in real time."

This evolving stream of truth (good and bad) is about to stare us in the face every time we visit our pages. It will be interesting to see how this will affect blogging as we know it. Do you think bloggers will elevate their game to gain accolades or simply become gratuitously extreme in order to stir conversation? To reserve an Echo subscription, visit the JS-Kit site.

"Follow this blog" is a clear call to action and those words will soon grace the header of every blog on Blogger.com around the web. When users click that link they'll be taken to either a tab on their Blogger dashboard, presumably if they have an account and are logged in, or be introduced to Google Reader, the company's RSS reader. It's a simple, brilliant plan and we wonder what took so long.

As this new feature is rolled out over the coming weeks, it appears that users will be brought to three key screens.

Blogger users will now see a mini version of Google Reader in their dashboards.

Apologies for the blurry pic, that's what Google posted.

Google Reader users will get a new folder for "blogs I'm following," and new users will apparently be shown Common Craft's fabulous 1 minute introduction to Google Reader.

Why It Matters

RSS is life and work changing technology. It's what makes an ecosystem of blogs possible by lowering the investment required by readers to follow and support a larger number of blogs than they would visit manually. It's what keeps those podcasts coming after you might have forgotten to download episode after episode. It makes search an ongoing practice instead of a one-off shot in the dark. RSS is huge, but the name alone intimidates many people who ought to be diving into it.

Surveys over the years have offered a wide range of estimates of the extent of mainstream RSS adoption. We know, though, that many many people do not ever use the technology.

"Follow" is clear language that we expect to go over well. It aims at the long held goal of getting people to use RSS without asking them to embrace the acronym. Update: Several people have argued since we posted this that "follow" will be far more clear to young users of social media sites like Facebook than to older users. Do you think "follow" is still too unclear? We think it's pretty good, but let us know in comments or the poll on the right.

We expect that Blogger.com blogs will see a big increase in subscribers following this change and we would not be at all surprised if other blogging platforms, Wordpress in particular, roll out "follow" language and links soon if the Google move is well received.