With the Thing Labs team focused almost completely on Brizzly for the last several months, the company's ability to give attention to both their intriguing social media client and the product that preceded it, Plinky, the pushy prompt site, looks to have run out. In an e-mail to all registered users, the team said this week's prompt, one of more than 400 published to date, would be the last. While the site will remain active for the near term, it won't be seeing much attention going forward.

When Plinky launched back in January of 2009, the concept was to inspire average social media users and bloggers to create new content "and look good doing it", as CEO Jason Shellen said. But the site didn't gain significant traction. Despite enticing a robust 28,712 registrations (as of 1 a.m. on April 7th), Plinky could not sustain traffic from their launch, fading to less than 10,000 visitors a month in the US, according to Compete.com.

Luckily for Thing Labs, Brizzly is a much different story, having sustained 100,000+ visitors each month for the last half-year, and recently adding a new iPhone application, at the beginning of March.

Plinky will be left open, for now, and the Thing Labs team didn't sound like they were trying to sweep the site under the rug with their note to users today, saying:

"We put a lot of work into it, and we think it's a great site. At the same time, we feel we have much more to offer with Brizzly than we ever could have with Plinky."

You can see the company's official announcement on their blog, titled "An important announcement".

As Twitter becomes infrastructure, and its features become well-known, it has become a challenge for third-party clients, like TweetDeck, Seesmic, HootSuite, Tweetie and others to separate from the pack. But a recent entrant, Brizzly, has a serious advantage that looks to be paying dividends. You see... the core team consists of Google refugees who left the Mountain View mothership after years of working on cool projects like Google Reader to try and continue innovating in a new space (much like Ev and Biz did when they left Blogger and eventually founded Twitter).

The team, properly called Thing Labs, also responsible for Plinky, has in a few months' time created a unique Web interface to Twitter that supports grouping, multiple accounts, inline multimedia and photo support. In addition, the site has also taken on a unique approach to managing the ever-popular trending topics from Twitter, and has an ace in the hole which lets you mute somebody who might be dominating your feed.

For the last six weeks, I have been using Brizzly, in addition to my monitoring Twitter through Seesmic's Web client, the company's standard interface, and wherever else Tweets may land - including FriendFeed and Facebook. And while there is no question the product is in its early stages, some of its major features are missing from competitive products.

Upon logging in, Brizzly leverages your Twitter credentials, using OAuth, to find your account data, including friends' updates, replies and direct messages. It also includes saved searches that you have enabled through Twitter.

These categories, including your direct messages in box and sent items, are on the left side of the screen. What's new, compared to the standard Twitter UI, is the addition of groups. You can make as many groups as you like, ensuring you don't miss updates from your real friends. For example, I have one called "Google Ecosystem" that's filled with current and former Googlers. This function is similar to Groups from TweetDeck, or Lists in FriendFeed. Seesmic, another Web client favorite of mine, doesn't yet support this feature.


Creating a New Group Called "Real World Friends" in Brizzly

My "Google Ecosystem" Group Displayed in Brizzly

The right side of the screen is where individual direct messages will appear, where you can view them or quiet them by clicking "Shh...". In addition, you can see trending topics, not just listed, but defined, by other Brizzly users. Think you can explain why Jay-Z is a trending topic? Just click "Why?: and put in a note.

The Brizzly team has taken steps to also make Twitter a little less text-centric. While Twitter continues to be limited by the number of characters people can send, and only showing text, Brizzly displays videos and photos from a variety of third-party sites in line. You can also post photos directly from Brizzly and have them hosted by Brizzly, with a dedicated page showing you how many views the photo got, along with your corresponding tweet.


One Image I Shared In Brizzly (and its stats)

Another Image Flowing Through My Brizzly Stream
A few weeks ago, I talked with the company's co-founder, Jason Shellen, for his thoughts on Brizzly, and what the team is trying to do in what's no doubt a very crowded space.

"We took a big bite out of the social Web with Google Reader. With Brizzly, our intent was to do some fun things with Twitter and see where that takes us," Shellen said. "Chris (Wetherell) and I come from a very social background, so we know that each community has its own flavor. With FriendFeed, the aggregation of all that stuff made its own community. We thought maybe what we can do is take you where you are in your community and give you better tools to manage that tool better. We are not trying to displace Twitter or Facebook, but make it a one stop shop with rich features on top."

Want to try those rich features, including the ability to retweet in line, and mute overtweeters? There are 250 invites, just for louisgray.com readers. Enter the code of daringbaking when you go to open an account at http://www.brizzly.com.

Starting a blog can be daunting for a lot of people. Jason Shellen, a key member of the original team that started Blogger, says that many people easily get disenchanted, asking "what do I do?", when viewing a blank page. His new service, Plinky, launches today, with hooks that not only help to connect friends, like many other social media tools, but also help to provide new discussion points, with an engaging tool called "prompts".

I spoke with Shellen today, in advance of this afternoon's launch, and he said he felt that while many different social media tools have focused on aggregation and developing rich media, less attention has been spent on the creation experience itself. As a result, many of these services have grown outside of the mainstream, limiting their potential market.

"I didn't think for the average user, there was really much work being done," Shellen said. "We wanted to develop something that was really fun, and I wanted to see answers to things I wanted to know from my friends. Plinky is to inspire people, and make them create content and look good doing it."


You Can Answer Plinky's Multiple Choice Questions


An Example Answer from Me On My First Paycheck
One of the quickest routes to creating interesting content through Plinky is answering one of the prompts, seen on the front page of the site. When you answer one of the prompts on Plinky, your answer is shown alongside other users of the service, and you can send the data out to any of third party services the product supports on day one - ranging from Blogger, to Twitter and Facebook, for starters.


Plinky Grabs Album Data from Amazon for My Mix Tape


I Can Send My Plinky Notifications to Twitter or Facebook
Plinky, which is starting off with a team of seven, based in Lafayette in the East Bay, also features many of the friend connection aspects you have seen in other products. You can browse all the users of the site, and choose to follow them, like making friends or followers in Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook. By following them, you can go to the drop-down of Answers and see "Followed Answers", giving you all the answers to prompts from those friends you following on Plinky.


I Can Choose to Follow Other Plinky Users
And like Twitter, you can even make answers to prompts as your favorites. So if a friend of yours says he has an awesome answer to songs he would keep on his mix tape, one of the prompts this week, you can click Favorite and see it in your favorites list.

If you think you are a social media guru and power user, or you're one of those bloggers who is posting stuff every day, Plinky might seem a little light for you, but for the much larger audience who gets writers' block and can go weeks without updating their blog, or maybe they posted a picture of their kid once and never came back, after sending a mass e-mail to their friends and family, Plinky is a fun way to get re-engaged with new ideas, as you answer prompts, see what other friends have said to the same questions, and can pass that data out to the rest of your online presence.

In a world of social media when so many things are about how many places you're signed up and everything you're doing, Plinky gets back and focuses on the social. Now, I just might find out whether you change clothes when you get home, what your favorite venue is to catch a concert and how you got started in your career. You can, as always, find me with the ID of "louisgray", here: http://www.plinky.com/people/louisgray.