Brizzly Marries Groups And Twitter Lists

When it was first unveiled at our Realtime Crunchup in July, easily one of the best features of the web-based Twitter client Brizzly was Groups. Basically, it allowed you to sort your Twitter followers into subsections, to make specific groups of users easier to follow. Of course, with Twitter’s new Lists functionality, you can basically do the same thing. So Brizzly is screwed right? Nope.

First of all, Brizzly has decided to make Groups play nicely with Lists — very nicely. Starting tonight, Brizzly is importing all of the Lists that its users have made on Twitter and it will begin showing them within Brizzly. But that’s not all: It’s also going the other way. Any Group that you made in Brizzly will be converted to a Twitter List. To be clear: A private Twitter List. So no, no one will be able to see that you put them in the “Loser” Group on Brizzly.

And of course, Brizzly does much more beyond Groups. Notably, it recently added Facebook support. That alone is worth the price of admission right there. But Brizzly also offers Direct Messaging capabilities that are superior to twitter.com. And it allows you to upload photos to its servers. And it displays pictures and video inline, in your tweet stream. So Brizzly should be just fine even with Twitter’s Lists now rolled out to everyone.

Brizzly expects the Groups to Lists transition to be complete by tomorrow night, co-founder Jason Shellen tells us. Here are the other main features he laid out in an email:

• We display, sync, create and navigate Twitter lists
• We provide an infinite scroll view of lists so you can scroll as far
  back as you like into a list
• Users who had created Brizzly Groups will see their groups migrated
  to Twitter Lists marked as “private”, but of course users can change
  that to “public” at any time
• We expect the migration to be done for all users by some time tomorrow night.
• Lists can be viewed by “tweets” or by “members”
• Lists are easy to create within Brizzly and make use of our
  auto-fill for users you are already following for easy creation