Caught a really nice video today about a new Twitter service called Brizzly. You need an invitation code to experience it for yourself, but check it out on YouTube. >Brizzly

Brizzly comes from ThingLabs, headed by ex-Googler Jason Shellen. TechCrunch has a decent article about it here. I’ve been dying for a way to manage my twitter groups, and to have some trend analysis done, from a user friendly hosted service. Looks like Brizzly might be a winner for that. Good luck, Jason!

The more I think about Google’s acquisition of Grand Central, the more I see it as a watershed moment in telephony.  Unlike Yahoo!, AOL and nearly every other large telephony concern, Google now supports, at the same time, open Internet standards and connections to the PSTN.  This is truly valuable, and unique, and should be celebrated.

Remember the speed geeking post from Mashup Camp last week? I am now ready to reveal my favorite mashup. But first, the final FINAL results are in. The speed geeking winner of Mashup Camp 3 with 18 nickels is….. drum roll please….. The Hype Machine!

The Hype Machine (http://hypem.com) combines music blog discussion, tracks, youtube video, concert and sales data to create a unique music discovery experience. (Powered by a healthy mix of Perl & PHP). Congratulations to Anthony Vlodkin – geek of the day.

My favorite? GBlinker by John Herren. gBlinker takes a Google blinky pin, interfaces it to a laptop via serial port, and uses a hacked a Gmail widget (using the Yahoo! widget engine) to make the pin blink when you get new mail.

Why is it my favorite? Simple, the big deal behind mashups is re-purposing. As creators of technology, you simply don’t know exactly how it will be used in the real world. Mashups recognize this fact by a clear delineation between the service and the application. In Voice Over IP, I think that’s been traditionally seen as a ‘bad thing’, as business models are hard to see in that environment. However, in the ‘Internet World’, there’s apparently more of a willingness to throw caution to the wind. That’s why this was my favorite mashup. That and, I suppose, the complete and sheer geekiness of this one was too much to ignore. Serial port hacking? Very nice.