Remember Friendster, the popular social network platform before Facebook came around? The founder, Jonathan Abrams, is currently working on a news platform, called Nuzzel.
Nuzzel is an application that lets you find the most popular stories your friends are sharing on Facebook and Twitter. In a nutshell, it lets you stay on the loop of what your friends are talking about, as well staying on top of the news.
To use the platform, simply log in using your Facebook account. The app would then start analyzing your News Feeds and Twitter feeds to find the links your friends are sharing. It will then arrange the news based on their popularity.
Of course, the news that have been shared and liked the most will be on the top of your Nuzzel feed. Nuzzel even gives a visual view of your news feeds. The top news that are shared can also be filtered according to when it was posted. For example, If I want to check what’s hot with my friends at the moment, I’ll check “the last hour”. You can even use the “news you may have missed” and the “recently read stories” features to do a spot check on what you have read so far.
What’s also interesting with this new app is that it allows you to see the news and stories shared by your friends’ friends. I am not sure if the app asked for my permission to access my friends timeline, and my guess is that it only looks at profiles and posts which are public. Finally, to go a step further, it highlights the feeds of other Nuzzel users, allowing you to see what stories are they reading. This is possible because once you sign in to Nuzzel, you are a Nuzzel user. And every Nuzzel user profile is public unless you specifically change its settings.
What I think about Nuzzel, and what are some of the features I’d like to see on Nuzzle
Overall, this is what I think of Nuzzel – it’s like an RSS that is built inside of your social network. It filters Facebook statuses and pictures posted by your friends and only focuses on the links they are sharing. It is an effective tool, particularly to journalists and marketing practitioners who like to tap on what the people around them are sharing.
I think I might like it more if it shows the comments – what people are saying about the news. Perhaps another feature I would like to see on Nuzzel is the ability to filter my feed by my Twitter followers only or by Facebook friends only. The reason is simple, I use Twitter to follow industry news, while my Facebook profile is private and exclusive to my friends. Both have entirely different content and I would like to keep it that way.
Currently, Nuzzel is being managed by Jonathan Abrams and Kent Lindstorm. Both of them worked together before on Friendster, which is now based in Malaysia. Of course they have helped build a lot of companies in the past, but it was Friendster which has made headlines everywhere, particularly here in Southeast Asia which was Friendster’s main market before it became a gaming platform. We are excited to see how this social news experiment will turn out for them.
Nuzzel is currently a web-based app. The company will be releasing an mobile app soon.
Also read: Singapore’s main newspaper Straits Times is now on Instagram