Anyone who wants to keep informed on what the world’s top angel investors are reading might find a Twitter list can accomplish this task, as long as you’re constantly watching for new updates. But for anyone who doesn’t have that kind of time (which is most people with any degree of responsibility), you may want to check out this list of links shared by the top 1,000 AngelList investors via news aggregation startup Nuzzel.
Nuzzel’s news gathering service consists of aggregating news into personalized lists based on who is sharing links on Twitter and Facebook — thus letting you know about the most talked-about articles in a set period of time. You can also see what your friends (and friends of friends) are reading and view an overview of news shared by people in the public eye like Marc Andreessen. The list of top AngelList investors is actually a collection of public figures, put together by the startup’s founder and chief executive, Jonathan Abrams.
[aditude-amp id="flyingcarpet" targeting='{"env":"staging","page_type":"article","post_id":1516371,"post_type":"exclusive","post_chan":"none","tags":null,"ai":false,"category":"none","all_categories":"entrepreneur,media,social,","session":"A"}']Why is this a powerful tool? Well, Nuzzel is basically only aggregating existing behavior from these top investors so you won’t be able to directly game things to a “front page.”
“This is kind of like a HackerNews or Reddit news community, but based solely on the content curated by the top investors on AngelList,” Abrams told VentureBeat in an email. “If you can get 10 to 20 of these investors to Tweet about your company, you deserve to be on this news feed.”
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Nuzzel’s top investor news list also provides an added layer of context by linking to the comment sections on Hacker News or Reddit if a particular link has been shared to either site, as well as a link to Techmeme to see a collection of news articles from other publications.
The one flaw in this method of news aggregation is that it only works if a lot of those top 1,000 AngelList investors actually share the news they read on social networks. But if you can substitute non-sharers for other influential investors, it might solve the problem.
Abrams told me the ability for other Nuzzel users to create custom lists is limited to Nuzzel employees for now, but he hopes to roll the feature out to everyone at some point in the future.
Regardless, the custom list tool is a good example of how Nuzzel is shaking up how people are finding news that’s important to them — and by using data that’s publicly available. (Also, it really puts Twitter’s trending news feature to shame.)
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