When Google Reader was shut down many people were upset.
Well, at least I was upset.
I used Google Reader all day, everyday. Many things have come up to replace it; currently I am still using Feedly, but Google did have its reasons for killing off the king of RSS readers. The reasons, or really reason, they did this was social. They were still trying to push their own Google Plus, and beyond that, Twitter and Facebook were eating into the news-sharing world.
People today get a lot, if not most, of their news from Facebook and Twitter. They let their friends and the people they follow curate the news for them and watch for the links that show up in their feeds. There are whole companies at this point that are building out this idea (Buzzfeed) and making their articles as sharable as possible. The new problem is that you have to be always checking your feeds to make sure you aren’t missing something. What if you are busy all day or don’t have that LTE connection you need. While some people will scroll all the way back through their feeds, not everyone does. Maybe you just want to know what things are being shared by more people. This is where Nuzzle comes in.
When you sign up you give Nuzzle access to your Twitter and Facebook accounts and watch it go to work. When you visit Nuzzel, via the web app or on your phone, you will see a list of the most shared items. You can select to see this from the last 24 hours, 12, eight, four, two, or even just the last hour. You can also go back and check by days over the last week as well, seeing what the most shared item was that day. They also allow you to go beyond just your friends and people you follow with a list of shared links from your friends’ friends. This expands your reach to see what is very popular.
My favorite feature on mobile is the ability to pick a number of shares and when a link or story crosses that number I get a notification. Thus, if there’s a news item that’s a big deal it’s usually shared by a lot of people and I can see that pop up. I currently have this set to nine, so if a story is shared by nine different people I get notified. They are also starting to allow you to see shares by list if you use lists on Twitter; this feature is still in beta though.
Nuzzel is a great tool for finding things out side of your RSS reach, leveraging your social graph to curate what is important. They have a web app, they are on iOS, and recently launched on Android as well. I highly recommend checking it out.
