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:

Click, tweet, e-mail, twitter, skim, browse, scan, blog, text: the jargon of the digital age describes how we now read, reflecting the way that the very act of reading, and the nature of literacy itself, is changing.

The information we consume online comes ever faster, punchier and more fleetingly. Our attention rests only briefly on the internet page before moving incontinently on to the next electronic canapé.

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Times are tough for the “tweet before you think” crowd.

Courtney Love was sued by a fashion designer after she posted a series of inflammatory tweets, one calling the designer a liar and a thief. A landlord in Chicago sued a tenant for $50,000 after she tweeted about her moldy apartment. And Demi Moore slapped back at Perez Hilton over a revealing photograph of the actress’s daughter.

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See what the power of the Internet can do?

Tracy Morgan joined Twitter Thursday afternoon in response to a brief campaign designed to encourage the “30 Rock” star to share his off-color updates with fans.

Using the name “RealTracyMorgan,” which has Twitter’s “verified account” icon, he posted his first tweet around 1 p.m. EST: “Welcome To Tracy Morgans World.”

Mr. Morgan followed that with a far less printable tweet, then “The wait is over! The black Svengali has arrived! I’m on the street turning good girls bad and getting them pregnant!!!” and “Im a good parent so ill induce the labor.”

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Can non-profits raise awareness, increase membership, and–most critically–“make the ask” successfully on Twitter? Can a 140-character message deliver the visceral wallop of, say, heart-wrenching footage of starving children covered in flies or the sad eyes of a neglected and abused animal? The answer is yes.

According to Beth Kanter, author of Beth’s Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media, organizations using Twitter that “take the time to engage supporters in a conversation and get to know them are more likely to build trust.” And that trust can turn into raised awareness, support, and ultimately donations for their cause.

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Is 140 characters simply not your style?

Lucky for you, there’s a new site billed as the “anti-Twitter”: Woofer, a so-called macroblogging service with a 1,400-character minimum per post.

While taking a break from work on a Friday afternoon, Peter Martin and his friend Portman Wills, both of Washington, D.C., decided it’d be entertaining to create a Twitter-like site that enforces verbosity.

Since its Aug. 14 debut, Woofer–which has a blue dog as its mascot–has had more than 7,500 users post updates, or “woofs.” More than 9,000 woofs currently total more than 520 million characters–an average of about 57,000 characters per woof, or about 400 times the number of characters in a maxed-out tweet.

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I’m trying to imagine how it happened. The point at which, perhaps three weeks ago, Jeff Pulver convened a meeting of the greatest minds in social media to thrash out the details of ‘140 Characters’ – his conference on Twitter and the “state of now” which kicked off yesterday in New York.

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As Ashton Kutcher becomes the first to collect 1 million followers on Twitter and Oprah Winfrey sends out her first tweet, tech observers are debating: Does Friday mark a new peak for the microblogging service? Or the beginning of its demise?

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Barack Obama’s online presence drove his campaign’s early fund raising and his primary victory over Hillary Rodham Clinton. His campaign’s use of Twitter, Facebook and YouTube proved that he was part of the Web 2.0 generation. In the run-up to November’s election, Senator Obama–or one of his staff members–typed more than 250 updates to his Twitter account at twitter.com/barackobama.

So what happened? President Obama hasn’t tweeted once since being sworn into office. He posts weekly five-minute videos at whitehouse.gov. Can’t the guy type a one-line update?

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It appears that micro-blogging service Twitter has removed the option to delete a “tweet” once it’s been published, making the service a haven for digital litter–the trail of information about you or things you’ve said that perhaps you shouldn’t leave lying around the Web.

Publish a status update on Twitter slamming your boss–at 2 a.m. in the morning after a night out at the pub–only to regret doing so seconds after hitting the “update” button, then you could be out of luck. As of yesterday (?) the trash can icon that used to reside next to Twitter updates has been removed.

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