Friendster Founder's Personalized News App, Nuzzel, Launches to Public

Nuzzel, the personalized news aggregator created by Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams, has launched to the public today after a year and a half in beta mode.

Nuzzel — not to be confused with news aggregator Newsle — is a free web app that links to Facebook and Twitter feeds to not only show timely story links, but also show relevant tweets and other commentary from sites like Reddit (I reviewed it in full here last year). Users can also view others’ public Nuzzel feeds without being logged into the service.

On the proliferation of personalized news apps available now — including Flipboard, Zite and Facebook’s own Paper — founder and CEO Abrams says Nuzzel is focused on “simplicity and social,” while “a lot of other apps are more focused on machine learning, or summarization, or human editors rewriting stories, or fancy algorithms.”

Former Friendster CEO Kent Lindstrom has joined as Nuzzel’s chief operating officer, Abrams said.

Nuzzel is Web only for now, but an iPhone app is expected to become available next month.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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