One small and unwritten bit of subtext in July's rumors of a Foursquare and Brizzly engagement was knowledge of Thing Labs' Dolapo Falola moving to New York from the Bay Area. While Thing Labs ended up at AOL later in the year, not part of Foursquare, Dolapo eventually did. The former Googler, Thing Labber and AOLer is now part of the 50-plus strong contingent at Foursquare trying to make the world a geosocial place.

Dolapo (@dolapo) started his software engineering career at IBM before 4 years at Google and moving to Thing Labs in the summer of 2009, where reunited with Google Reader teammates Jason Shellen (@shellen), Chris Wetherell (@cw) and Ben Darnell (@bendarnell), the team created a new Web-based approach to real-time feeds from Twitter and Facebook, spawning the group chat platform, Picnics, now part of AOL's AIM property.

His addition to the Foursquare team pushes employees at the company beyond 50, according to the firm's team Twitter list. (http://twitter.com/#!/foursquare/team/members) The list also includes product manager Noah Weiss (@noah_weiss), another former Googler whose joining was mentioned by Business Insider in mid-January.

It's said often that where there is smoke, there is fire. In early July, I tried to read the smoke signals emanating from Brizzly co-founder Chris Wetherell and investor Mike Hirshland on Twitter about a myterious "buyout offer" and "legalese", incorrectly guessing the social media client was going to be joining up with Foursquare. It turns out that my hunch correctly had sniffed out fire, but completely whiffed on the suitor. Instead of a 2010-era nimble startup, Brizzly's acquirer is the 1990s-era AOL, who can now be confirmed is picking up Thing Labs (makers of Brizzly), including the company's well-respected small team, and all company assets, from the Brizzly Web and iPhone client, the Brizzly Guide, the URL shortener, and even its colorful mascot, Phineas T. Brizzly the bear.

The acquisition is said to be at $18 million guaranteed, with potential earnouts to near $30 million. The company's founders, Jason Shellen and Chris Wetherell will be running AOL Instant Messenger and the company's lifestream service - giving the pair high profile roles that could impact millions of users immediately.

It was this acquirer that set off the curious tweets in July, putting the team in an odd position of having to deny they were being sold to Foursquare. What was not said, however, was that no sale was taking place, period - because, indeed, those gears had started to turn at an Old Media company speed.


That Thing Labs would be the target of potential M&A activity is no surprise. Shellen and Wetherell are given a good amount of credit for their work at Google on Reader and Blogger, with Shellen's work dating prior to Google's acquisition of the Ev Williams-co-founded Pyra Labs back in 2003. The team is very sharp, and had created not just "yet another" Twitter client, but one that had deep ties into the social graph across multiple networks, and a lightly heralded, but very cool, collaboration system called Picnics.



Mike Tipped Us M&A Was On, But It Took Months to Bake

It's Picnics that has AOL ready to take Brizzly out for more than a mere lunch.

The combination of a top-notch team and intriguing technology saw Thing Labs enter into potential acquisition talks with multiple partners this summer, some who eventually found the product not to be a perfect fit with their portfolio, and still others, who were rejected by the company's team out of fear they would be part of a soulless "talent buy" who would take Brizzly off the map. Meanwhile, as these distractions emerged, the company retained the opportunity to initiate the raise of a Series B round of funding, following their $600k Series A round completed in late 2009. Other potential acquirers included Yahoo! and Google, both of which Thing Labs was said to have turned down.

Yet the somewhat unlikely partner of AOL, a media giant with a damaged brand, especially in the mind of Silicon Valley and startup entrepreneurs more specifically, has emerged as the victorious buyer, following due diligence not just from their team to see if Thing Labs would be a solid complement to their still-popular with millions of people Instant Messenger client, but also from the Thing Labs developers, who wanted to be sure of the quality of AOL's development team, especially as some of them had experienced less than satisfactory relationships with younger gung-ho teams at large Web services previously in their career.

As has been reported by AOL-watchers like Kara Swisher and Mike Arrington over the last couple years, the company is trying to gain a respectable presence in Silicon Valley, under the leadership of former Googler Tim Armstrong. But with company headquarters in Dulles, Virginia, and much of the leadership in New York, AOL is struggling to attract and retain top talent in the Bay Area. The prospect of being acquired by a Web 1.0 property like AOL initially tugged at Thing Labs' leadership, while recognizing the financial benefits for the company's 7 employees, who for the most part, excluding the cofounders, could be seeing a tax bracket upgrade after this transaction settles. While the deal is officially being reported as $18 million, the contract calls for significant earn-out clauses, which could drive the eventual price up to as much as $30 million, serving to provide Golden Handcuffs to the team's talent and locking them up to the company that once flooded the USPS with floppy disks promising free hours each month of dial-up service and a walled garden.

AOL is obviously on an acquisition spree, rivaling only Google in terms of buzz in the last few months. The Thing Labs acquisition follows news today that the company also picked up TechCrunch itself, bringing the tech blog titan into the content-focused Web pioneer. The company also purchased 5 min yesterday.

Interestingly, with the TechCrunch acquisition, AOL has Crunchbase, and with the Thing Labs acquisition, AOL also has the Brizzly Guide - a more real-time directory, edited by users. The two could be complimentary, separate or one could be retired. It's said the Brizzly Guide will be used for real-time home page news curation.

Additionally, the work with Foursquare turned out not to be completely empty after all. While not part of the M&A transaction, Brizzly announced integration with Foursquare overnight, letting you view checkins alongside updates on Twitter and Facebook in the service.

As a sidenote, this continues the unique career path of Thing Labs' Ben Darnell, who in the space of just a little over a year, has worked at Google Reader, then FriendFeed, then Facebook, then Thing Labs and now, AOL. But this time, he probably made a little bit of money. Ben has recently been known for his contributions and leadership to the Tornado Web server project. AOL might be seen as old tech, but it picked up some serious new media leadership here.

Official word of the deal should break soon.

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".

Although I covered a pair of panels from the South by Southwest conference in Austin yesterday, I didn't go deep and explain why I chose to return to the event, which I first participated in and attended last year. Thanks to work at home and with Paladin, I almost opted out of SXSW in 2010, but after being offered the opportunity to speak on behalf of users everywhere and talk about how we may be losing the battle against products that are poorly designed or don't have our input, I had to accept - and therefore, I am spending the weekend in Austin. Tomorrow, in a core conversation, where I will participate in tandem with Chris Wetherell of Thing Labs (makers of Brizzly), and formerly of Google Reader we will sound the alarm for users to once again get the upper hand.

As users, we for too long have not had much of a voice in the products we are expected to use. We have been dragged through iteration after iteration of beta software, expected to accept poor user interfaces, lost data, incompatibilities and decisions that have been made that benefit the company rather than ourselves. We have seen violations of privacy, we have seen sites that we like abandoned when founders get bored, or when the acquiring company has no interest in supporting the existing community.

In an allegedly social world, we have seen companies think all they have to do is start a Twitter account or beg you to join their Facebook pages, but instead of having real connections, the are sending out their interns to spout coupon codes and collect follower counts. We have seen discussion boards and feedback forums created, and then ignored.

Users are not to be feared. Users are to be embraced - and very often, we may have some fantastic ideas in terms of how to drive your product strategy that will help your company gain in differentiation, gain market share, and outperform the competition.

This is not a game of power users demanding power and access. This is a cry for help, to give us the option to trust you again. Just like every airline reminds us at the end of every flight, yes we have choices, and we are looking for solutions that give us real value. We want to help you.

If you are at SXSW in Austin tomorrow, please take up a torch on behalf of users everywhere, and join us at 11 o'clock to talk about how we can prevent products we like from becoming products we hate - and ask developers to take us seriously. We are in Hilton J, and the session is titled: "Products vs. Users: Who's Winning?"

Join us: http://my.sxsw.com/events/event/770

Thing Labs, the parent company of Brizzly, one of the more innovative Twitter Web clients out there, unveiled a slew of announcements this morning, with the acquisition of popular iPhone application Birdfeed and WikiRank, a visualization Web app based on Wikipedia data. The acquisitions will help fuel the launch of Brizzly's first branded iPhone application, and a new Brizzly Guide, which extends the trend explanations core to Brizzly since the product debuted with permanent definitions, accessible even after a topic stops trending.

The Brizzly Guide, as you can assume, looks much like Wikipedia, integrating a trending topics definition with related links, and a Twitter search. For example, Chuck Norris is trending because he turns 70 years old today, and SXSW is trending because of its debut on March 12th. This furthers the company's focus on the Let's Be Trends API launched last fall.


"I would love to see the Guide fill the gap in 'why are people talking about this' and 'what is it' that I don't see on Wikipedia or other search/news sources. Wikipedia is definitely of great value and we use it for context on some Guide pages," said Thing Labs CEO Jason Shellen. "We are turning on new ways to contribute and can't wait to see how our users continue to help explain the world around them."

Brizzly's new iPhone application, released today, has been much awaited, and a clear hole in their lineup. But the company took a different approach. Rather than building their own app from scratch, they acquired Birdfeed, and worked with the developer, Buzz Andersen (@buzz), who recently joined Jack Dorsey's Square, to add new features and release it as a branded app.


Brizzly's New iPhone App With Custom Tabs and Photos
The new iPhone app features many Brizzly-only features, including Brizzly Guide support, uploading of photos to Brizzly Pics, and muting from Brizzly.com. It also features multiple account support, lists, saved searches, classic retweets, custom tabs and infinite scrolling, according to a microsite on the new product, found at http://brizzly.com/iphone/.

With such a wide number of Twitter clients out there, from dedicated Web clients to iPhone or Android applications or still others for desktop operating systems, each that has gained traction has done so thanks to its unique features and innovation, which attract loyal users. Brizzly, a popular Web client which supports multiple accounts for both Facebook and Twitter, has gained traction thanks to inline display of videos and images, a new approach to direct messages, and integrated definitions for trending topics.

As interesting to me as the product itself, among my favorite Twitter apps, is Thing Labs, the team behind Brizzly. The majority of those on the company's small engineering team hail from Google, most visibly headed by CEO Jason Shellen and co-founder Chris Wetherell, who were among the creators and champions for Google Reader, the RSS reader where I spend much of my time online taking on the data firehose. With Jason and Chris turning their attention toward social services, the company has been pleasantly surprised by gaining more users than originally anticipated, and is now working to scale the service without the benefits of a massive organization like the one they enjoyed at Google.

In a candid, yet casual, interview I held with Jason and Chris on Monday at their San Francisco headquarters, the pair walk us through Brizzly and its place within Thing Labs, how they view their product, and how their experience growing Google Reader, and in Jason's case, Blogger, prior to its acquisition by Google, have help set the stage for their new startup's growth. After a series of incremental changes in the last few months, it sounds like Brizzly is heading for some large introductions in the next quarter, probably before the SXSW conference, which will have everyone who has ever looked at the product to revisit it and see what's new. The full interview, about 10 minutes in length, is embedded below:

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.