In late August Br.st was nothing more than a URL shortener service with link stats and malware filters. While the company allowed users to cross post to social networks like Twitter, Myspace and Digg, it was simply too late to the space to be considered a contender. As of today the caterpillar has transformed into a butterfly. Br.st is spreading it’s new wings with a slew of features and instead of resembling Bitly, it’s looking a lot closer to the current social media reader of choice Brizzly.
Br.st offers the basic features of Brizzly including the ability to edit your status, view your Twitter feed, direct message friends, retweet great content, view trending topics and save searches. But where Brizzly also incorporates Facebook statuses, Br.st forgoes Facebook and concentrates on its URL shortener roots. The company does a great job of ensuring against malware through inline link, image and video previews.
Additional key features include:
1. GeoTags: Images with geotags are automatically displayed alongside a map of their location
2. Text Shortener: Br.st automatically reduces your word count with Twitter shorthand (“2” for too, “u” for you)
3. Image Upload: You can upload images and files up to 10MB each
4. Commenting: Users can comment on your images and files
5. Analytics: In addition to real-time links on your stats you can also set up Br.st to notify you every time a person leaves a comment or downloads your files
6. Follow: The service allows you to find people and instead of scrolling through people you can search for a person and either unfollow them or add/remove them from a list.
7. Conversations: Users can create conversation threads around a specific message and keep all of those replies in one place.
While there’s a great deal of overlap between Brizzly and Br.st, the two companies are clearly close competitors. Test Br.st by registering here and let us know your favorite Twitter tool in the comments below.
