Nuzzel Custom Feeds and the Future of Online News

Nuzzel’s current app and website focus on showing the top news stories that your friends have shared.  (We also have a friends of friends feed, and you can browse other people’s Nuzzel feeds).  People love using Nuzzel this way, both in San Francisco and around the world.  But personalized feeds are just the beginning of what Nuzzel can do!

We’ve recently been experimenting with Nuzzel Custom Feeds, based on lists of people that are not necessarily your friends nor people you follow.  For now, we have been using Twitter Lists, a powerful but low profile feature, and are considering other future data sources too.  A Nuzzel Custom Feed can be based on any kind of list of people.  For example: people who live in a certain area, people who work at a certain company, people who are part of a certain community, or people who are influencers in a certain topic.

Members of the Nuzzel team have been experimenting with (and debugging) this new platform for the last few months.  We’ve created cool test feeds on topics like fertility, vegetarian cooking, libraries, wine, and hockey.

We are pleased to announce today that Nuzzel Custom Feeds are now enabled for all Nuzzel users.  Any Nuzzel user with a connected Twitter account and Twitter Lists will now see those lists powering Custom Feeds via Nuzzel.  (New Twitter Lists will be picked up by Nuzzel within 24 hours.)

Nuzzel Custom Feeds represent a new approach to curation and discovery of news content in vertical areas.  As with the core Nuzzel experience, Nuzzel Custom Feeds use a social aggregation approach, not human editors or machine learning.

Nuzzel Custom Feeds are a great example of harnessing the wisdom of the crowds to create something useful.  This platform can be used to create millions of news communities that are automatically updated each day.

Interested in the Silicon Valley tech industry?  Instead of reading news chosen by one editorial team or a random online community, you can see the top news stories shared by Marc Andreessen’s hand-picked list of industry figures.  Or check out a feed of the news stories shared by the top 1000 investors on AngelList.

But Nuzzel Custom Feeds are not just for tech industry news!  Here are some other fun examples!

• Here’s a feed about Bitcoin from Ernest Oppetit, a Product Manager in London: http://nuzzel.com/ErnOpp/blockchain
• Here’s a feed of stories shared by people who work at Twitter, based on a list created by Revenue Analyst Lev Naginsky: http://nuzzel.com/levnaginsky/twitter-team
• Here’s a feed of top stories shared by “Awesome B2B Marketers” from Andrew Angus, CEO of Switch Merge: http://nuzzel.com/andrewangus/awesome-b2b-marketers
• Here’s a feed of “Nonprofit Resources” from non-profit and community consultant Alison Rapping: http://nuzzel.com/AlisonRapping/nonprofit-resources
• Here’s a feed on “Mobile Health” from Dylan Boyd, Director, New Programs Development, R/GA Ventures: http://nuzzel.com/dtboyd/mobile-health
• Here’s a feed about Football from Brandon R. Gibson, a Comcast sales representative: http://nuzzel.com/graisinbrand/football
• Here’s a feed of stories shared by “Top Yoga Experts” from marketing technologist Travis Wright: http://nuzzel.com/teedubya/top-yoga-experts
• Here’s a feed about Beer from Tyler Gillies, co-founder of Little Bird: http://nuzzel.com/tylergillies/beer

These examples are just the tip of the iceberg.  We expect to see thousands of new Nuzzel Custom Feeds created to address many interests and industries, and we plan to build new tools to highlight and promote interesting feeds created by the Nuzzel community.

Update: here is coverage of Nuzzel Custom Feeds in TechCrunch, The Next Web, and Fast Company.