Business Opportunities Weblog

November 23, 2009 by Rich Whittle | 2 Comments

On the sixth floor of a trendy building in San Francisco’s recently renovated Mint Plaza, four former Google employees — scratch that: five former Googlers, with today’s addition of FriendFeed’s (now Facebook’s) Ben Darnell — and a few others are working on things, reports The Los Angeles Times.

Founder Jason Shellen is purposely fuzzy with his description of ongoing projects. Whereas Google famously has “20% time,” a policy that lets engineers spend one-fifth of their day working on anything they want, Shellen says his workers get “100% time.”

For the last five months, the majority of that time has been spent building Brizzly, a Web application that combines your Twitter and Facebook profiles into a single interface.

After gaining some viral interest through its invitation-only sign-up system — a strategy that has worked exceedingly well for Gmail and now Google Wave — Brizzly is unlocking its doors today. Anyone can sign up and plug in their social network credentials.

But Brizzly remains in beta despite having tens of thousands of users. The product is ahead of most desktop apps in its stability and interface but is not yet a replacement for Facebook because you can’t fully browse friends’ profiles, view events or upload pictures. And the app currently lacks some newer Twitter features like geolocation, which is available in only a few programs anyway, and standardized retweet, a project originally spearheaded by Thing Labs’ vice president of technology, Chris Wetherell.

So why should you care? There’s plenty of websites and apps for accessing Twitter. TweetDeck and Seesmic, like Brizzly, can pull in Facebook as well. And while Brizzly is stuffed with potential even now in such an early stage, Shellen’s track record hints that there’s much more to come.

Continue Reading: “Ex-Googlers Working On Things”

Photo by Los Angeles Times.

In Google, Startup | 2 Comments