How to curate Facebook and Twitter content in personal and niche networks using Nuzzel
An elegant tool alerts you to popular content in personal and bespoke networks.Nuzzel is an aggregation tool that allows you to see news shared by the people that you follow in your Facebook and Twitter networks. It’s an extremely efficient way to curate content within a network.
The networks both have in-built algorithms to curate content. Facebook has the newsfeed and Twitter has moments and while you were away. Both have trending topics.
But neither of these tools are sufficiently personalised to my network. Facebook’s default is the lowest common denominator and Twitter is hellishly noisy.
Nuzzle, launched in March 2015, enables you to work around algorithms. It finds you the stories that your network is sharing.
The start-up was founded by Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams. It has attracted backing from across the US publishing industry.
How to use Nuzzel to find trending content in niche networks
The app enables you to create a feed by setting thresholds for the number of shares (three to 25) over a time period from an hour to week.
I’ve been trialling the app (Android and iOS) for the past four weeks with a trigger of five, and time period of 24 hours. It has reliably alerted me each time a new story is posted in my Nuzzel feed.
Every alert has been relevant. Nuzzel has enabled my network to become my editor in a way that other tools have failed.
Nuzzel also automatically generates a daily newsletter based on your alerts, and integrates with Slack enabling you to share news with a workgroup.
Using Twitter lists to track communities and niche topics
You can create a customised feed using a Twitter list. This is a powerful feature for tracking popular content from a bespoke network.
Twitter lists are much-underused function of the platform that enable you to include people in a list without following them. In this way you can use Nuzzel to track niche networks.
If you build a list of experts in any subject from bitcoin to relationships, or metallurgy to US politics, Nuzzel will serve you stories that they are sharing.
Nuzzle automatically generates a feed of the content as It hits the trending thresholds that you set. You can chose to generate or email newsletter alerts.
You can also extend your network by adding friends-of-friends and follow other user’s Nuzzel feeds. For me these additional features are unnecessary and dilute the app’s purpose.
Business model
Nuzzel is building scale for now. Monetisation will come later, although my hunch is that the app will get snapped up by a publisher or tool vendor. Native advertising aligned to niche topic areas would be an obvious high-value opportunity.
RSS used to be the sole means of curation. Now there are a variety of tools in the automated curation space that work hard to out-do social network algorithms, most notably paper.li which builds an online magazine based on content shared in a network.
Nuzzel is a useful tool for spotting trending news in a personalised or custom-made network. Its use of both real time mobile alerts and email is useful. The feed in a raw or newsletter format has lots of applications.
I’ll continue to use Nuzzel because it is so easy to personalise, straightforward and relevant.
