Title: Nuzzel
Cost:: Free
Platform: iOS 7 or later
Nuzzel is a great way to aggregate specific aspects of a Twitter or Facebook feed. The app pulls together posts from your feed(s) that include links and creates a stream of just those posts. The stream includes posts from those you follow, friends of those you follow, and news you might have missed. It also will keep track of articles that you have recently read within the app – when you’ve clicked on a link in a post from a friend or a friend of a friend.
Settings in the app allow you to sort posts within a particular period of time – say just the past 24 hours – and to display the posts by most popular – say Tweeted five times by those you follow on Twitter – or by most recently posted/Tweeted.
It seems like a simple idea, it is, but it can really be a bit life changing for you, the teachers you work with, teens, and others who sometimes feel overwhelmed by what 24 hours – or more or less – comes through in their social media streams. As a library staff member working with teens and other educators if you like to use Twitter as a professional development tool, you might miss several hours of posts on Twitter. As a result you might feel like there’s no way to easily go back and find what you missed. But, with Nuzzel there is. While you won’t see what your friends on Twitter or Facebook are posting about their lives with Nuzzel you can easily just see what’s posted that links to an article or web page or website of interest. It’s a perfect way to keep up with news without being sidetracked by the fun and great things your friends are doing.
One of my favorite Nuzzel features are the links that are from friends of friends. I’m a fan of that because that’s where I usually find the resources that I would probably have missed if I stayed within the silo of those that I follow. This is a great part of the app that will probably be of interest to educators and teens too. It’s always easy to find out what the colleagues and friends you talk with and see every day are finding interesting, but what about those who might be a little removed from one’s every day world? Maybe they have some interesting things for you to know about as well. I could see teachers using this app feature as a way to expand their own research and professional development and in working with teens as a way to expand their knowledge of topics beyond what they might find within traditional sources and through friends and family members.
Nuzzel also has some good features for saving and sharing content including the ability to post links via Buffer, add to a reading list, open in Safari and share via email, text, etc. The look and feel of the iPhone and iPad versions are a bit different. The iPad version of the app allows you to look at feeds individually – friends, friends of friends, and so on. I like that capability but it’s not really a problem to not have that in the iPhone app, particularly because of screen size and capabilities.
Don’t let the simplicity of Nuzzel fool you into thinking it’s not worth checking out. I think you’ll find that it’s the simplicity that really makes it worth your time.
For more apps for teens and the librarians who serve them, check out the App of the Week archive. Have a suggestion for an App of the Week? Let us know.
