Nuzzel just announced some big changes.
On the heels of closing a $1.7 million funding round, the social news startup launched Nuzzel 2.0 for Web, iOS and Android on Thursday. Most notably, the new version of Nuzzel does not require a
Founded by Jonathan Abrams back in 2011, the goal of Nuzzel is to help people cut through the noise on social media and discover news they actually care about. The social news startup previously required users to sign in via a Twitter account and then surfaced stories that might pique the user's interest based on what was being shared by people they follow. Now, even people who don't have a Twitter account can use the service. With or without a Twitter account, Nuzzel users can search for specific stories and news feeds and view recommended stories sourced from what people are sharing on social media.
"So all of our feeds, for both users who login with Twitter and do not, are still based on a social curation approach where we aggregate social signals together to determine top stories," explained Abrams in an email.
If interested in a certain topic, users can also search for news feeds compromised of the top news stories shared by people discussing that particular topic online. If interested in keeping up with certain topics, Nuzzel users can swipe between "favorite" feeds. Nuzzel's email subscription and push notification functions are now available to all users in the new version--even those not on Twitter.
Several previous investors in Nuzzel contributed to the startup's most recent raise, in addition to a number of new investors including Akash Garg, the director of engineering at Uber, and Marc Benioff, the founder and CEO of
