ReadWriteWeb

Thing Labs, the company behind social media stream reader Brizzly, has been acquired by AOL, multiple sources have now confirmed. The startup is led by Jason Shellen, who managed the creation of the category-killing Google Reader years ago, and Ben Darnell, who was a key engineer in creating Reader.

It was just one of three major acquisitions by AOL announced today, including video site 5 Mins and of course market-leading tech blog TechCrunch. AOL has long been the home of some of the most popular social products (AIM) and destinations (Engadget) online. The addition of the expert stream team from Thing Labs is a bold move that will help the big media company compete in the era of Facebook and the News Feed.

Twitter slipped a new option into users' settings earlier today that hinted the service may soon display images and video inline with users' 140-character updates, much like Facebook does in its News Feed. Moments after it was seen and reported on, it was gone again.

With Twitter keeping mum, questions abound: What will this feature look like? Will it slow Twitter's already-taxed servers? And will people use it?

Want to turn your website into a storm of real-time user activity? Another way to do so has just arrived. The real-time web framework called Tornado, which Facebook open sourced last Fall, has just released version 1.0.

Tornado is a real-time web server built in Python that supports tens of thousands of continuous connections and thus the long-polling method of real-time data delivery. It is the core of FriendFeed, a technically innovative service built by two ex-Googlers and leaders in the real-time web community, which was acquired by Facebook in August, 2009. Built largely by the man who is now CTO of Facebook, Bret Taylor, this first version of Tornado was taken across the finish line by another heavy hitter: Ben Darnell of Thing Labs.

For power users, the Twitter website is often just a thing of the past. We've moved on to third party interfaces with multiple columns, special user list navigation, search, and so on. But what about the novice user that wants something more than Twitter.com?

For that, there's Brizzly, a web-based Twitter client that today is announcing the release of its awaited iPhone app, along with a neat feature or two.

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.

Brizzly wants to be to microblogging what Blogger.com was to blogging five years ago. Currently, Brizzly offers a user-friendly browser-based interface for Twitter and Facebook. The Facebook integration went live today and more social media applications will be added as the product evolves. Brizzly was founded by Jason Shellen, one of the original developers of Blogger (acquired by Google in 2003).

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).

One of the greatest problems of this environment is said to be the capacity for information overload. At a Summit session, representatives of some of the most "filter-geeky" real-time startups debated the methods and merits of parsing data from the real-time web. Shellen's was one of the most authoritative voices in the session, and his one-on-one insights are well worth listening to.

We just spent a whole day talking about the real-time web a the RWW Real-Time Web Summit. While the general mood was obviously extremely upbeat, a few sessions at the conference also focused on some of the questions that still remain to be answered. Brizzly's Jason Shellen, for example, asked us what we hated about the real-time web, while Stinky Teddy's David Hardtke focused on how we can make sure that information on the real-time web is credible.