Brizzly Shuts The Doors – Focusing On AIM

It's official – Brizzly is closing their doors, shuttering the site and service and focusing all of their efforts on the next-generation AOL AIM platform.

In a post on the Thing Labs blog, Grant Shellen writes,

“…Brizzly is shutting down at the end of this month.

I know this stands in stark contrast to the last post I wrote, wherein I said that “kill Brizzly” wasn’t on our “to do” list heading into our new roles at AOL. That statement still holds true, though. We didn’t plan to get rid of the service we spent the prior year or so building, but we knew there was a possibility it might not make sense to continue work on it. Sure enough, once we set to the task at hand—improving the hell out of AIM—we had little to no time to work on Brizzly, and it became clear that the new things we’re working on are far more worth our time and attention.”

Now that all of the teams efforts have focused on AOL “properties” and AIM in particular, the question arises of when/will AIM perform some of the many cool content curation features that were in Brizzly.

Shellen continues in his post,

“…Last month, we released the next generation of AIM. While it doesn’t do the core thing Brizzly does (show you all of the tweets from people you follow), it does have vastly improved group chat with media expansion—a lot like Brizzly Picnics. It also tells you when people have mentioned, liked, followed, or commented on your Twitter, Facebook or Instagram content, or when you have new Gmail or AOL Mail messages.”

Sad to see another cool tech startup bite the dust after such a short time.

Let's see what the team can do with AIM now. Expecting some some good things hopefully.

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• As Brizzly Enters Its Final Hibernation, AOL Tries To Sharpen Its Social Media Claws (techcrunch.com)