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Nuzzel for Android lets you know what stories your friends are talking about

Nuzzel for Android lets you know what stories your friends are talking about

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The iOS and web-based social RSS feed is now available on Android, too

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Nuzzel is basically a free social RSS reader for news stories shared by your friends. The service — which is already available on the web and iOS — launches on Android today. It curates the links being shared by your Facebook or Twitter friends, simply counting which stories have been tweeted or posted the most often in a 24-hour period. This list can then be digested as either a scrollable feed in the app or a daily newsletter sent via email. You can see who shared a link, what they said about it, and read the story without having to jump into a different app. There's also an option to simplify webpages into a text-only format for easier reading.

Nuzzel can help you deal with the deluge of links and stories shared on social media

Nuzzel is a simple app, but it's definitely worth trying if you're someone who finds the deluge of the Twitter feed too much to handle. It also does a good job of surfacing stories from people you don't follow. You can look at "News from Friends of Friends" or browse "Featured Feeds" — the stories being shared by friends of the great and good on social media. This last feature is a bit unimaginative in its choice of individuals (for me it was mostly tech investors, tech pundits, and Jeff Jarvis), but it does give you an insight into the sort of stories that are making people sit up and listen outside your own bubble.

You can also use the app to set up personalized news alerts when a critical mass of your friends are talking about the same story. This is a bit similar to Twitter's MagicRecs bot, which, if you follow its account, sends you a direct message about popular events; for example, when people you follow all favorite a particular tweet or follow the same person. But while MagicRecs can be a bit superficial (often the bot just tells you when a bunch of people are favoriting an in-joke), Nuzzel's app offers this same service plus a fully fledged reader. If you've got a fear of missing out, it's worth giving it a go.