When I started Six Colors in 2014, one of the first tools that I adopted was Nuzzel. Nuzzel looked at my Twitter feed, and even my Twitter lists, as well as the feeds of other people, and turned that information into a newsreader of sorts—powered by the links shared by the people I chose to follow on Twitter.
Alas, we can’t have nice things, which is why Nuzzel is dead. It was acquired by a company called Scroll which was acquired yesterday by Twitter. The only possible upside here is that Twitter says it’s “exploring how to bring the Nuzzel experience to Twitter.” And the truth is, Nuzzel would be great as a feature of Twitter, because it was always just an alternate view of Twitter, or of the web powered by Twitter.
Sometimes I felt like I was the only person who used Nuzzel, but the announcement of its discontinuation has brought numerous journalists out of the woodwork to decry its loss. I hope that Twitter takes that reaction to heart and builds a new version of Nuzzel, or something like it, that uses the power of social-media streams to aggregate and curate interesting links.