Following Tweets
When this post was in draft I was planning to write about Tweetdeck: why I use it, how I use it and why I love it. However I practically stopped using Tweetdeck. Why? Well, I tweeted about it here and here: I'm loosing too many tweets. More specifically: I simply don't want to miss tweets from some people. That's one of the reasons I started to read tweets from Google Reader (which doesn't really work for me). (I also use Google Reader to backup my tweets. This does work great.) I didn't uninstall Tweetdeck yet, though. I found myself using Tweetdeck again to live tweet a conference...
What I liked about Tweetdeck is what everybody likes about it: It makes tweeting much easier. Retweeting is easy, defining Groups is easy, adding hashtags (automatically) is easy, etc.
Then I bumped into Brizzly! Brizzly is a webclient, a layer over Twitter. It is still in beta. It is far better than the Twitter website. At the time I started using it Twitter Lists and Retweet was not available yet. Brizzly had these features and implements them well. Brizzly called Lists Groups, but changes their Groups to Lists when Twitter launched Lists. There's a bi-directional sync of Lists (making List in Brizzly shows up on the Twitter site and vice versa). Adding people to Lists in much easier in Brizzly (incremental search).
Retweet has been implemented in Brizzly like it is in Tweetdeck. Even though Twitter now also has Retweet functionality, I still like the old way better (and so I agree with Stowe Boyd).
The best part of Brizzly is when you scroll through your tweets, the page is updated automatically. You can scroll down and down through an endless list of tweets.
So, although the Twitter website is moving in this direction, I have enough reasons to stay with Brizzly!
Do you use Brizzly too? Tell me about your experiences. And what tools do you use to follow tweets?
UPDATE Nov. 21, 2009: I forgot to mention some other features I like about Brizzly. Brizzly clearly shows the tweets you haven't read yet. So, you know where you left off last time you were reading tweets. I also like the fact that Brizzly expands url's automatically for you, so you can see the url and make a better decision to click on it or not.
