Twitter is a mixed bag -- consider yourself lucky if you chance upon the good tweets, and charge it to experience if you get the worse in your morning newsfeed. Aside from being a source of news leads, it becomes, after all, a thinking and freedom board for some users. How do you then segregate what's trash from gold in a social networking site that publishes millions of tweets daily? Nuzzel may be the answer.
Nuzzel, a start-up based in San Francisco, California, is a service that provides analysis to your Twitter feed and an up-to-the-minute report through an email, according to The New York Times. The most-commented articles take the top spots. When given permission, it analyzes Facebook feed, too.
However, its basis isn't on machine learning or algorithms predicting the kind of stories that users find interesting as grounded on their social networks. This makes it largely different from other news-aggregating services such as News360 or Prismatic. It doesn't even use editors such as Facebook's Paper app or Flipboard for curating news.
"For the last six months, I've been using a service called Nuzzel - now available to the general public - that offers one smart solution to the problem. It works by focusing on a simple concept: What are the people you follow on Twitter all buzzing about?" Vindu Goel wrote on The New York Times.
Nuzzel is rather closest to Summify, a social news aggregator acquired by Twitter in 2012.
"Nuzzel packages these top stories for you with the context of what your friends said about it," said Nuzzel's founder and chief executive Jonathan Abrams, who is also founder of the now-defunct Friendster. "I wanted to create a tool to basically solve social overload-to give me personalized news without having to do any work."
Goel also described Nuzzel as "more like overhearing the conversation at a cocktail party filled with the people you find interesting." He added that it is useful for the casual user of Twitter, quickly compiling the most-talked-about stories in the last 24 hours.
Another good feature noted by Goel is, how you can set up email alerts to immediately get notified when, say, about 10 people, left their comments on a certain article. If you're up for breaking stories, he claimed Nuzzel is a great service.
Meanwhile, Abrams further said that there's no need to get a Twitter account or a Nuzzel account to view Nuzzel feeds because these are generally out in public. He disclosed his own feed is viewable at nuzzel.com/abrams. Yet you can make your feed private if you want.
Previously, Nuzzel was in beta mode, requiring you to send an invite before you use the service. It became open officially to the public on Tuesday. Take note that iPhone users have to wait for a couple of months more as the Nuzzel application is working on its final tweaks, while Android users sadly have to wait till the end of 2014. According to Adams, his more immediate plan is the integration of LinkedIn and Google Plus to the service.
Two years after its creation, Nuzzel raised $1.7 million in funding with notable names of investors such as George Zachary of Charles River Ventures and Dave McClure of 500 Startups, among others.
