Not good at using Twitter & Facebook for news? Nuzzel's new email subscriptions may help

For those of you that either don’t have the time or aren’t very good at using Twitter and Facebook to find the best or most important news of the day, know that you are not alone. News aggregation startup Nuzzel, however, does have a pretty good solution: Mooch off of other people who are good at it.

Today the startup is launching a new feature that will let you subscribe to email updates collecting the aggregated social news feed from certain influential people. The goal here is that you can benefit from someone else taking the time to follow and interact with the best news makers/sharers on Twitter and Facebook, even if you rarely use either service often.

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“Someone who doesn’t really know how to use Twitter probably still gets a portion of their news from email [newsletters],” founder Jonathan Abrams told VentureBeat. He added that these same users are also less likely to connect with Nuzzel via a Twitter or Facebook account. So the email subscriptions have the added bonus of increasing the number of people getting news from Nuzzel.

The new email subscriptions are really just an extension of what Nuzzel has already been offering for a while now. As an individual that has a healthy network of news sharers, Nuzzel’s service aggregates news based on who is sharing links on Twitter and Facebook. You’ve also been able to navigate to other people’s Nuzzel feeds, but until now you couldn’t track that on a regular basis via email.

Eventually, you’ll be able to track anyone with a public Twitter feed through Nuzzel email subscriptions. But for now the feature is only available for a handful of influential personalities in the tech industry, including Chris Sacca, Eric Ries, Gary Vaynerchuck, Om Malik, and Tim Ferris.

Why is this important? Well, Nuzzel is dangerously good at pulling out trends in news sharing activity within networks for individuals as well as unique groups of people. At the same time, Twitter’s “trending” section leaves a lot to be desired when it comes to finding interesting or popular news — especially when compared to Facebook, which has managed to turn its news sharing into a separate stream of revenue driven by digital publishers. That said, Nuzzel makes Twitter useful in a way I haven’t experienced since first signing up for the service years ago. (Like, back when broadcast TV news anchors were still poking fun at it.)

“Twitter is still so important when it comes to news, Abrams told me. “Facebook may drive more traffic, because it’s bigger, but the average Nuzzel user probably gets more of their content from Twitter than Facebook.”

So yeah, Nuzzel is important because it is useful to a variety of people and potentially very important to Twitter itself as the number of active Nuzzel users increases. Abrams admitted that Nuzzel currently has a relatively small (but active) number of users, which should increase over the next six months as the startup ramps up its promotional efforts now that it has both an iOS app and a fresh investment.