Brizzly, the Web-based twitter client from Thing Labs, covered in Almost Famous two weeks ago, begins public beta today.

The company, which has been in invitation-only beta for months, riffs on the standard Twitter interface by automatically displaying tweeted images in line with the standard 140 characters and relengthens all those pesky shortened urls.

In addition to opening its “expanded” Twitter interface to the world at large, Brizzly is offering an on-the-fly translation tool (based on Google Translate) for foreign tweets, which it says will help users discover new information and gain context.

AllThingsD.com has learned that besides opening the front door to the public, the innovative start-up just grabbed former FriendFeeder and current Facebooker Ben Darnell for the team. Ben was an early Google (GOOG) employee and worked on the Google Reader team with Thing Labs founders Jason Shellen and Chris Wetherell.

Here are two screenshots–one off Brizzly’s new public beta offering and one of the translation feature:

When it comes to social-networking sites, women are more plugged in than men, according to data analysis by Brian Solis, president of Silicon Valley public-relations firm Future Works.

Mr. Solis used Google (GOOG) Ad Planner to determine the gender breakdown of users signed up for the most popular social-networking sites and found that in most cases, women outnumbered men. “The point of interest that’s worth review and discussion is that in social media, women rule,” he wrote.

For example, the data show that on Facebook, 57 percent of users are women and 43 percent are men, with the same gender breakdown on Twitter and Yelp. On MySpace, it’s a whopping 64 percent female, and on the social-network-creation site Ning, 59 percent of users are women. There’s slightly more equitable gender distribution on YouTube, which is half women and half men, and professional-networking site LinkedIn has the same gender breakdown. On the photo-sharing site Flickr, women make up 55 percent of users, as they also do on FriendFeed.

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One week ago I met Kara Swisher in Rome. She asked me about Twitter in Italy and I told her we were about Twitter in 2007 but now we’ve moved on (we had read about Twitter here and here). Mainstream Web users are all on Facebook (Facebook has been huge here since last summer) while Web-savvy people interested in microblogging now prefer FriendFeed with its richer features.

I thought it was the first time something Americans where going mad for was already out of fashion in Italy.

Maybe that is why Kara was not satisfied with my answer. She was attending an ad sellers meeting, and the people she had talked to were not exactly Web-addicted. I would say not one of them knew who Arianna Huffington was before reading her name on the speakers panel (Arianna! Don’t fire me! Italian bloggers love you!). She stayed at a wonderful hotel near Via Veneto where they know all the tricks to make you believe Dolce Vita still lives on.

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Like is the new favorite, which was, at one time, the new bookmark. This small, but important feature will reinforce relationships between friends and followers and those who produce, interact with, and share content.

Made popular by services such as FriendFeed, and now Facebook, the idea of liking an update is much bigger than merely bookmarking or favoriting (yes, it’s a new verb in the social Web) updates from friends and contacts for later reference. The act of liking is quickly emerging as a simple, but complimentary gesture of acknowledgment and reciprocation to recognize the contribution of someone whom you follow.

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Here we go again. Over the course of the last several months, we’ve heard that FriendFeed was going to kill Twitter. Then Twitter was going to kill FriendFeed. Then Facebook was going to kill FriendFeed. Now Facebook is going to kill Twitter. But something odd is happening. Instead of any of them dying, they’re all thriving, each gaining traffic and users–and they’ll continue to. So what gives?

I hate to reuse my twisting of the catchphrase from the old Highlander films, but I feel compelled to remind everyone once again: There can be more than one.

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I’m imagining a world where each of us, and all groups, networks, enterprises, institutions, agencies and NGOs, have dashboards which are associated with our online presence. Some of these dashboards exist today in the guise of “NetVibes” start-up pages or as iGoogle and MyYahoo pages.

Facebook, MySpace and all social-networking software are another kind of dashboard. And all social media services–from Twitter, Friendfeed, and Flickr to dopplr, Blurb or NetFlix (NFLX)–they’re all dashboards, each with its own nuance, subtlety and approach.

Anytime you see “About” or “Your Account,” that’s your dashboard. So each account you have, everywhere, is another dashboard.

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I recently discussed the viability of Twitter evolving beyond a micro community into a standardized platform for macro conversations. It’s certainly the path Facebook is traversing. And, both are making significant progress in the race to syndicate and aggregate the discussions that are important to us within our respective social networks.

There is another emerging platform worth discussing as it is quietly growing into an alternative solution to the disparate communities that are pervasive throughout the social Web.

Ladies and gentlemen, add FriendFeed to your radar for listening, participation, and relationship building.

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For some reason, this weekend has seen a lot of talk about what FriendFeed is/isn’t/should be doing (see Louis Gray and others). One person even predicted that we will fail.

I considered writing my own list of complaints about FriendFeed. I think and care about it a lot more than most people, so my list of FriendFeed issues would be a lot longer. I may still do that, but there’s something else also worth discussing…

One of the benefits of experience is that it gives some degree of perspective. Of course, there’s a huge risk of overgeneralizing (someone took a picture!), but with that in mind…

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Early every morning, I open my Web browser and load up a half-dozen “aggregator” sites: Techmeme, Memeorandum, Real Clear Politics, Google News, the Drudge Report, and the Huffington Post. This is my first sortie into the day’s news, the way I orient myself to what’s going on in the world now that I no longer subscribe to a print newspaper. After picking clean the smorgasbord of links, I dip into a second set of sites, these pulling in quirkier tales from around the Web: Digg, BuzzFeed, Fark, Hacker News, Boing Boing, and Kottke as well as my personalized Web aggregators at Friendfeed and Google Reader. During the course of the day, I repeat this process often; in my manic hunt for the freshest stuff on the Web, I reload some of these sites 10 or 20 times each.

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In yet another powerful showcase of Twitter’s potential power as a disseminator of information, today several people received the first information via the service that NASA has confirmed that its Phoenix Mars Lander has, in fact, found water on Mars. It’s still not on CNN.com, not on MSNBC.com, not on Fox.com. But a Twitter search query reveals it’s all over Twitter.

As a result of the news spreading quickly through Twitter, it’s also now all over FriendFeed, where some discussions are taking place on the subject. This is the kind of stuff these services are built for.

The water was found in ice-rich soil. Tests confirmed the ice was water-based.

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Lately the echo chamber of the blogosphere inhabited by the Gillmor Gang (of which I am a member) has been caught in a loop of Twitter-FriendFeed convulsions.

Steve Gillmor believes that Twitter is the communications medium of the future. Send out a message to your followers and track (when the feature is enabled) the loosely coupled conversation as it wafts deeper into the cloud. FriendFeed, on the other hand, aggregates feeds from Twitter and many other sources, creating an index of the content (gestures in Gillmorspeak) an individual chooses to share with followers.

Twitter’s friendly API allows applications to be built on top of it (when the site is up), letting FriendFeed and other services tap into the Twitter stream. In addition, FriendFeed allows users to comment on the contents of the aggregated feeds and has “rooms” for discussions among a group of people.

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Another weekend means another bitchmeme, and this weekend it was all about FriendFeed. [Blogger Robert] Scoble has a good summary of the debate, so I won’t rehash it all, but I did want to throw something into the mix:

Ultimately, it’s all about the user.

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Over the last six months, it seems like every Web site is adopting the notion of a “newsfeed.” These feeds keep me informed about the status/actions of all my friends and relationships. I have a Facebook newsfeed. I have a Twitter feed. I have a LinkedIn feed. And even more recently, a new category of products called feed aggregators have arrived. These aggregators, such as FriendFeed and SocialThing, allow you to track your feeds across multiple sites. There has even been a spoof site that aggregates the aggregators.

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We’ve seen a lot of new aggregation services and lifestreaming applications come into play recently, and we’ve questioned whether they’re adding to the conversation or just adding to our information overload. (See our coverage on FriendFeed, for example). And today, MyBlogLog even added even more lifestreams to subscribe to.

The truth of the matter is, like it or not, the conversations that once existed solely in the blogosphere have now moved on. People still comment, but in a lot of cases, those comments aren’t found on the blog itself. So the question is, has the conversation become diluted among all the different services and applications? Or is it just adding layers to the original topic? And most importantly, how can you keep up?

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So now, in addition to this blog, my tumblog and Twitter, I have to pay attention to what’s going on in FriendFeed. So it’s gone from being an aggregator of attention to a demander of attention. Good for them. That’s the way to play the game on the Web.

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