Brizzly

» see brizzly.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

brizzly was a US thing. silicon valley and the ex-google reader crowd. not me, not in 2009 ankara, where the only twitter people i knew used the official web client or tweetdeck. brizzly never had a real turkish footprint. but the people who made it were the people who had made google reader, which i did use until google killed it. that is enough of a thread.

thing labs was founded by jason shellen in 2008 after he left google, where he had been the founding product manager for reader. chris wetherell, also ex-reader, joined as co-founder. brizzly launched at techcrunch's first “real time stream” event in july 2009 as a web-based twitter and facebook client. it shipped inline photos and link unshortening at a time when twitter.com did neither. it also shipped the now-quaint “mute” idea, which the official twitter web app would not match until 2014.

AOL acquired thing labs in september 2010 for around eighteen million dollars up front with earnouts. the founders were supposed to lead AOL's AIM team and a new lifestream product. instead the acquisition followed the usual AOL acqui-hire arc. shellen left first. the lifestream product never shipped at scale. on march 1 2012 the brizzly blog announced the site would close at the end of the month. AOL did not say much about it.

~ the case file ~

~ the funny part ~

brizzly's mascot was a bear. the bear sat at the top of the page above whatever was happening on your timeline, with a little dialog bubble that explained features. nobody else was doing UI bears in 2009. years later when shellen brought the brand back, the bear was the first thing he restored.

~ the long tail ~

in 2018 shellen bought the brizzly name back from AOL's eventual owners and launched a follow-up called brizzly+, which let you edit and auto-delete tweets and gave you back some of the ergonomic features the original web app had pioneered. that product itself eventually wound down once musk's API repricing in 2023 made third-party clients unviable. the brizzly name has now died twice, in slightly different forms, with slightly different bears.

~ what got buried with it ~

the thing labs acqui-hire is worth flagging on its own. AOL spent the 2009-2012 window buying small social tools at premium prices (bebo was the headline; brizzly was one of several footnotes) and then letting most of them die quietly inside the larger company. the integrated social product the acquisitions were supposed to add up to never showed up. brizzly was a small, well-loved piece of that pattern. when the official twitter web client finally caught up on mute and lists in 2014-2015, almost nobody remembered who had shipped those ideas first.

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