With the release today we have added the following features:

• “Sticky States” – if you search for something, then click on the images tab, then back to home you will still be on the same search.  Br.st now remembers where you were at!  Another benefit is that after you send a direct message it stays on the direct messages, it does not open and reload your timeline.
• Pop-up Twitter User Info – click on Twitter username and a box pops up with info about that user.  We are going to add more info to this box and a follow button tomorrow.
• Favorite Lists – you can now “favorite” a list to get it to show up on the right side bar.

Let us know what you think of these new features.  Coming tomorrow hopefully will be bookmarklets, tweetie support and auto-refresh.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

New Web-based Twitter Client Brings Facebook-like Experience to Twitter

Phoenix, AZ November 23, 2009 – Brinkster, a web hosting company, launched br.st (burst) a web-based Twitter client (at http://br.st), providing a rich experience similar to Facebook. Br.st offers features such as: “as you type” URL shortening, text shortening, expanding conversations, sharing of images and files, inline previews of images and videos, and advanced statistics. “We are excited to debut a Twitter client that truly changes the way you experience Twitter,” said Jared Stauffer, CEO of Brinkster.

By showing users previews of shared images, videos and links, and expanding conversations (via @replies) br.st provides a rich Twitter experience that users have long been requesting. “One thing that makes Twitter difficult to use is the need to click to another website to see what your friends are sharing. With br.st you can see what your friends are sharing right in your timeline,” adds Stauffer. Br.st displays previews of images shared on br.st along with Twitpic, yFrog, Pic.im, Pikchur, Tweetphoto, Pic.gd, Twitgoo, and Picktor. Video uploaded to YouTube, Vimeo, TwitVid, Vidly, Yahoo and Google are also automatically displayed.

Real conversations are now possible on Twitter with the “open conversation” button at br.st. By expanding the conversation users can view what other users were replying to and all previous tweets that were part of the conversation. Users can also expand links from over 130 URL shorteners, taking the guess work out of what lies beneath the commonly used shortened URLs.

The other side of the experience is how easy it is to tweet and share links, images and files on Twitter with br.st. The box users type their tweet into has been enhanced to automatically shorten links that get typed or copy-and-pasted in. When a user adds an image or a file, a short link for the item is created and placed within the tweet. Another feature that is unique to br.st is the Text Shortener. Often when composing a tweet, users have a hard time keeping it under 140 characters. At br.st you click a button and your tweet is shortened by changing your “for” to “4” and your “and” to “&” along with many other commonly used abbreviations.

Other advanced features br.st offers are the displaying of Geo Tags found in images, preview of Google Maps found in short links, comments on images and files uploaded, and advanced real-time statistics for br.st links, images, and files. Br.st also supports Twitter’s new Lists functionality.

Br.st is a service of Brinkster (www.brinkster.com, @brinkster), a 10 year veteran of the web hosting industry.

About Brinkster

Started in 1999, Brinkster is a web hosting company with customers in over 175 countries supporting over 60,000 domains. The company offers shared web hosting, dedicated servers and email hosting services from its own private top-tier datacenter in Phoenix, Arizona. http://www.brinkster.com

Contact Information: press@brinkster.com

Brinkster is a registered trademark of Brinkster Communications Corporation. All other names of companies or products may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

# # #

We pushed out another update for br.st today.  The following was fixed/changed:

• You can now tag and sort images/files with unicode characters like Chinese.
• Lists no longer allow unallowed characters in the name.
• Lists management has been improved.
• You can create new lists again, thanks to us making a change in reaction to an unannounced Twitter API change that broke our previous code that created lists.
• And you can now view the public lists you are following. Yeah!
• Above the tweetbox nows says “What’s happening?” instead of “What are you doing?”.
• P.S. – in case you missed it yesterday on the Links tab shortening a link is closer to the old br.st experience of shortening a link.

Please continue to send your feedback and don’t forget to tell your friends about br.st!

Br.st has been released for public beta use.  We are excited to see a large number of new users on the site – welcome!  We got our first nice writeup from ReadWriteWeb – thanks @SuzyPerplexus.

We also pushed out a new build today with the following changes/fixes:

• Fixed an issue that if caused the buttons on the site to stop working if you left the page alone for awhile.
• Took away the slightly unpopular auto-follow @brdotst when you signup for br.st the first time.
• Linked the “about 1 minute ago” text under each tweet to the individual Twitter post per user request. (thanks @casschin).
• Lists: you can now view public lists you are following under the Lists sub-nav tab.
• Shortening Links: after login, from the Links tab, when you shorten a link it looks a lot like the old br.st in that it shows you the screen shot, title and meta data for the link you just shortened.

Please let us know your suggestions and likes/dislikes about br.st by sending email to feedback@br.st or @brdotst.

We fixed the final set of bugs that we found and the site is ready for public release.  We also added the just released by Twitter (API functionality wise) – Find People.  You can now search for people on br.st just like you search for people and follow them, unfollow them and add them to Lists.

A cool bonus for this new Find People feature is that if you have a large number of followers you can just search for a person and either unfollow them or add/remove them from a List.  This is much easier than paging through your followers to find them.

We are very excited about this release and we hope that all the new users will be as well.  Remember to tell a friend about br.st and tweet about it!

A big thanks to all the people who are beta testing the new br.st during our private beta.  We are fixing the last remaining bugs and the new ones that people find on a daily basis.  Each day at about 5pm EST we are releasing a new daily build with the latest bug fixes in them.  You can see a list of the latest bugs and bug fixes here.

We are also hearing rave reviews of the new br.st.  We are glad people are enjoying it as much as we had hoped.

We have been quiet for several weeks now, but it was for a reason. We were deep in development of br.st v2.

Version 2 actually does not do it justice, this is more like a rebirth. Br.st v2 is a web based twitter client with some awesome functionality: auto shorten links, add images/files to tweets, text shortener, auto expand and preview of images, videos and links in your timeline, lists, @reply threads. And that is just getting started, there are so many cool features it is hard to mention all of them.

What is private beta? Private beta for us means the new service is released, but you need to request to be a part of the beta. How? Just email beta@br.st and we will add you to the list. When it is ready you will get an email inviting you to start using the new br.st website.

When does private beta start? Hopefully be end of day Wednesday, Nov 11, 2009.

When does public beta start? We are targeting middle of the week of Nov 16th – so roughly Wednesday, Nov 18th.

So email beta@br.st if you want to try out the new site during private beta.

Jared

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

New URL Shortener br.st! Debuts with More Advanced Analytics than Bit.ly

Phoenix, AZ September 2, 2009 – Brinkster, a web hosting company, debuts a new URL shortener called br.st! (burst).  br.st! allows you to take a long URL, shorten it, share it to 10+ social networking sites, and then track the traffic to it.  In the crowded field of URL shorteners br.st! offers advantages over others with advanced analytics, scanning for malware, preview links with screenshots, easy posting to social networking sites, and iPhone bookmarklets.

Several URL shorteners offer analytics, including market leader Bit.ly, but few offer them as advanced as br.st!  With br.st!, real-time stats are automatically in the visitors own time zone and can display the comparison of up three metrics graphically (total, country, region/state).  Bit.ly displays stats in US Eastern Standard time zone only, does not show location deeper than country, and shows only one metric graphically at a time.

br.st! scans for malware three different times during the use of a br.st! link.  Each scan is done against the Google Safe Browsing list that is updated every 30 minutes.  Links are scanned when they are first submitted to be shortened, when a preview link is accessed, and when a short link is clicked on.  This helps prevent someone from submitting a link and then adding malware to it after it has been shortened.

br.st! users also have the option of adding a “-” to the end of any br.st! link to view a preview page.  The preview page displays a screenshot, page title, meta keywords, malware scan information, and the full destination link.
After shortening a link at br.st!, users can type a tweet or post and select from 10+ social networking sites including Twitter and Facebook to send it to.

br.st! also offers bookmarklets for use on the iPhone with Tweetie and Twitterrific.  The iPhone bookmarklet takes the website address that a user is viewing and automatically shortens and posts it into Tweetie or Twitterrific. http://br.st/iphone-bookmarklet.aspx
br.st! is also planning on releasing Google Analytics integration and image and file sharing in the next 60-90 days.

About Brinkster

br.st! is a service of Brinkster, a 10 year old web hosting company with customers in over 175 countries supporting over 60,000 domains. The company offers shared web hosting, dedicated servers and email hosting services from its own private top-tier datacenter in Phoenix, Arizona. http://www.brinkster.com

More information can be found about Google Safe Browsing at the following websites:
http://code.google.com/apis/safebrowsing/
http://www.stopbadware.org/

Brinkster is a registered trademark of Brinkster Communications Corporation.
All other names of companies or products may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

# # #

We found that when you post a stats link in Twitter (old: http://br.st/74! new: http://br.st/74+) the “!” would not get highlighted as part of the link.  And the same thing was happening to “=” for the preview links.  As a result we changed the stats to “+” and the preview to “-” as these two extra characters were making it automatically in to the links on Twitter posts.

Let us know if you have any feedback regarding this change.  The br.st! website has been changed to reflect this update.

We tweeked the screenshot generator today and it is working much better.  That feature is a little tricky.  It does not load websites that have a lot of flash, but appears to be loading well the dozens of different sites we checked.  Let us know if you find a site that you think it should load, but is not.

Also the bookmarklets got updated.  The regular bookmarklet was not working in IE, we fixed that.  And the iPhone bookmarklets were not working properly either.  The behavior we anticipated when pressing down on an image link did not work like we thought it would – so we changed it to a text field that you can select all and then cut and paste in to an edited bookmark.

The iPhone bookmarklet is actually really slick.  If you are viewing a website you want to tweet about, open your bookmarks, select the br.st! bookmarklet that you just created.  It grabs the URL of the site you were on, sends it to br.st!, shortens it, and then opens Tweetie or Twitterrific and starts a new tweet with the br.st! short link.  Check it out: http://br.st/iphone-bookmarklet.aspx.

And we are excited to see the first group of users start shortening links and posting them.  Don’t forget to send us your feedback!