News App Nuzzel Tries to Appeal to Everyone by Moving Beyond Twitter
Social news service Nuzzel has a captive audience. Tech journalists and venture capitalists are big fans. But that’s a small crowd.
Nuzzel works by suggesting stories to users based on how many times they’ve been shared by those they follow on Twitter. For example, if you follow a bunch of venture capitalists, you may find a story about Jack Dorsey or Square today in your Nuzzel feed.
The model makes a lot of sense—if you use Twitter. The problem is that a lot of people don’t use Twitter.
So to solve this problem, Nuzzel is launching a new version of its service today that it has dubbed Nuzzel for Everyone. Twitter users can still sign up and get a customized feed, but non-Twitter users now have a way to use Nuzzel, too. Anyone can download Nuzzel or open the website to find feeds built off of what people are talking about on Twitter. But now you yourself don’t have to use Twitter to see them.
“If you’re a regular person, one of the other billion-plus people online, if you can even find one celebrity or community feed on Nuzzel that’s somehow relevant to you, I think that would be a massive shift for a lot of people,” says Nuzzel founder Jonathan Abrams, who previously founded early social networking site Friendster.
Users can now subscribe to Nuzzel-created feeds that follow relevant Twitter users—anything from a feed about libraries made up of librarians and archivists on Twitter to football to LGBTQ politics. You can also follow the Nuzzels of other users built off their own Twitter feeds, like Marc Andreessen or Steve Martin.
For Nuzzel, this shift marks a significant attempt at expansion after landing a new round of $1.7 million in funding from investors like Salesforce CEO Marc Beinoff. But, as with any app, even if you build it, people won’t necessarily come. Nuzzel’s competition ranges from Facebook and Twitter itself to news-specific apps like Apple News and Flipboard. But Abrams believes Nuzzel’s simplicity sets it apart. The news is right there waiting for you; you don’t have to go through the labor of curating your own feeds. “I don’t think regular people are ever going to do that,” he says.
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