Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, has acquired inspiration tool Plinky from Thing Labs, who are also creators of the Brizzly Twitter app. Terms of the deal have not been disclosed.

Plinky provides a daily prompt or question and asks the user to respond with text, photos and multimedia. We first wrote about the website when it launched in January 2009. Backed then, we said it offered “a new twist on microblogging” with a pretty interface, but that it also suffered from “a bloated sense of self.”

Automattic has found a smart use for the app, though. In its blog post, the company behind WordPress.com clearly positions the acquisition as a way to overcome writer’s block. Getting started with Plinky on your blog requires signing up for a Plinky account though, but we imagine that barrier will eventually be dissolved as it gets stronger integration with WordPress.

If WordPress.com lives and dies by the amount of content its users generate, then Plinky should be a powerful tool to get new and causal writers to create more content.

img credit: xanxhor

Web-based Twitter client Brizzly has three major developments to report: a new free iPhone app, a new Brizzly Guide (which gives trending topics on Twitter their own hub pages as permanent resources for information on the top Twitter discussion items over time), and the acquisition of WikiRank.

The Brizzly Guide is a user-editable area that fleshes out the backstory and adds contextual information to Twitter trends. Loading up the Guide shows the top 10 current trending topics at the left, and either a description of that topic or a prompt to be the first to explain the trend.

Taking cues from wiki-style user-editable sites like Wikipedia, the Brizzly Guide encourages users to curate the landing pages that will act as resources for current and past Twitter trends over time.

The free Brizzly iPhone app is available now in the App Store, featuring multiple account support, lists, photo uploads, saved searches syncing, classic-style retweet functionality, and support for the new Brizzly Guide with user-editable trends and news topics.

Further evidence of Brizzly’s adoption of wiki-style philosophy comes with the announcement of the company’s acquisition of Wikirank, an app that visualizes Wikipedia data and will soon, presumably, help visualize Brizzly data and build out a more robust Brizzly Guide. Wikirank displays popular and trending pages in a clean and easy-to-use interface. CEO Jason Shellen said of the acquisition, “We will be integrating Wikirank technology into the Brizzly Guide over the coming months,” so we should expect to see more from the Twitter client surrounding trending and data visualization in the near future.

Are you a Brizzly user? What do you currently use to monitor Twitter trends?