Brizzly for iPhone (Née Birdfeed)

Birdfeed, Buzz Andersen’s outstanding iPhone Twitter client, has been purchased by Brizzly, updated, and rebranded as Brizzly for iPhone — and is now available from the App Store as a free download. There are some nice additions (such as the addictive pull-down-to-refresh gesture introduced by Tweetie), but a few steps back as well, including the loss of Birdfeed’s visual charm.

My main gripe is that it’s not a direct Twitter client any longer. Rather than sign in to Twitter, you sign in with an account at Brizzly. If you have multiple Twitter accounts, you must hook them up to your Brizzly account. I don’t see any benefit to this, but I do see an extra potential point of failure. The deal breaker for me, alas, is that they seem to have eliminated Birdfeed’s Instapaper support.

On the upside: our long national nightmare of conflating Birdfeed and Birdhouse is now over.

★ Wednesday, 10 March 2010