- Summary:
- So Twitter acquired Nuzzle, and now the service is offline. Enterprise curators now have options to consider - such as upstarts like Tweetshelf and Murmel. But why curate? And why bother with social news aggregation? Read on.
It seems like yesterday I was bemoaning the fall of Digg Deeper, making the case for why content curators need "intelligent news services" - and no, I wasn't talking about AI (The fall of Digg Deeper and the struggle for intelligent news push notifications).
In that piece, I discussed options for social news curation, including Nuzzel. Well, that didn't last:
Don't need any hand holding on Fleets but a "we're sorry" would be nice for buying and unnecessarily neutering @nuzzel when you surely could have maintained it until you finished your navel-gazing on what it could someday be. https://t.co/rpV54dsMEI
— Jon Reed (@jonerp) July 14, 2021
After some of the bluster I saw from the Nuzzel team over the years, seeing them go from Nuzzel to muzzled was pretty pathetic. Get acquired by Twitter? Fine. But offering wet noodle excuses for shutting down while Twitter figures out what to do with you? Weak sauce. And yet, this shouldn't come as a surprise. From the infamous fall of Google Reader on down, curation services have a habit of folding at the drop of a hat.
Or, in the case of Scoop.it, leveraging free audiences only to impose an incredibly heavy-handed monetization scheme (The problem of curation platforms, and the Scoop.it monetization clampdown).
My content curation argument - with a modification
Since we started diginomica, I've extolled the underrated role of content curation for enterprise content producers. But - one important criteria has changed. This change is crucial - if we want to protect ourselves from losing services (Nuzzel) that were central to our workflows. These principles can be applied by both individuals and content teams.
My modified curation argument:
1. Curation is an outgrowth of your research process, an important part of the 'deep work' cycle that results in exceptional content.
2. Curation is not just a tool for recognizing (and growing) the community that informs your thinking. It's a way to share as much of your research process as possible to the public domain.
3. Trusting social media algorithims to surface the best content is foolish. But: "intelligent" push notification services can help to make your social feeds more timely and relevant.
4. Most serious content curators are RSS die hards. However, social curation tools can also play a big role in helping us extract the best content from the noise.
5. (New rule): Getting by on free services is a mistake. If we want content curation to be a sustainable discipline, we should be prepared to pay for tools, so that their creators can find sustainable business models.
In the case of Nuzzel, mocking them publicly brought a nifty benefit: pings from new social curation tools.
So after snarking @nuzzel for selling out to Twitter and (unnecessarily) shutting down, I heard from cool @murmel_social startup.
They are adding features- they added RSS on my request, improved daily/weekly curations. 30 day trial, I'm on paid plan. Recommend for curators.
— Jon Reed (@jonerp) August 3, 2021
My enterprise curation process - from research to newsfeed to creative content
Before I get into the new tools, a bit about the "why" and "how." For my own curation tools, I use a range of services for bookmarking and tagging. Most of them I pay for, and I've built in some redundancy in case tools go belly-up. I won't go into all the tools here; I did share more detail as of 2019.
I have private bookmarking tools I don't share publicly. The engine for my public sharing is my trusty Newsblur RSS reader. Standout enterprise content from Newsblur goes into public boards, such as my enterprise Pinboard collection (8,700 articles and counting). That Pinboard RSS feed is the basis for distribution to various social media channels, including my Twitter jonerpnewseed and daily email curation.
If I stumble on a quality article via my social feeds that I don't subscribe to via RSS, I might well subscribe. If I can't subscribe or don't want to, I'll push that to Pinboard via a bookmarklet. That also goes out to the jonerpnewsfeed. In turn, that newsfeed collection is the basis for my weekly selections of standout content in Enterprise hits and misses. This is the foundation for our weekly diginomica missive, which our partner success manager Alex Lee expertly organizes (you can subscribe by clicking on that button on the top right).
I explain this to illustrate: a curation workflow does take time to setup, but much of it can be automated (Dlvr.it is key for me there). Once you do that, your curation is multi-purposed across channels. This makes the effort well worth it.
Which brings us to the burning question: why should social news aggregators play a part in our curation workflow? I've addressed that in detail here, but the short version is: trusting in the wisdom of social crowds doesn't cut it:
Most folks I talk to are willing to let their social networks surface what's important. Given the dual problems of flawed algorithms and the social popularity contest that's been hijacked by marketing and personal branding agendas, I urge readers to question the assumption that our networks will surface all we need. Investment in research and curation tools remains a differentiator.
Bring on the aggregated news services. Most of them have some form of push notifications as well, to make us aware of crucial content that's bubbling up from those we follow:
Push notifications matter because they give us the confidence to step away from incessant monitoring of a noisy stream. We can trust that the most important content will be surfaced for us.
Some of us are fortunate enough to have access to enterprise-grade curation tools at our workplaces. If so, great. If not, however, there are some good options to consider - even with Nuzzel out of the picture. In my case, Nuzzel was always a backup option, and Nuzzel's RSS options weren't robust. Nuzzel had an interesting bonus feature, creating your own personalized newsletter each day, but to me, the real highlights were the breaking news alerts, which you could set to different push frequencies.
Here are a few options to consider:
Thresholderbot - this is a no-frills service, designed to make sure, via email, that you don't miss the most popular links shared by those you follow. As long as you're on Twitter, and you follow interesting peeps, Thresholderbot will surface useful things for you, in a timely way. Thresholderbot does NOT provide an RSS feed, though I can approximate this in Newsblur using Newblur's email newsletter import. I like it and use it, but I would urge readers to support paid services as well. The hard lesson of free services is their demise.
Murmel - Murmel, as referenced above, is a paid service with a straightforward-but-useful mission: "Get the hottest news stories shared by your Twitter friends without stress or missing out on anything." It's a paid service, but individual pricing for a "basic service" (with plenty of features) is reasonable. A "pro" version is coming, which includes tracking Twitter lists. The Murmel development team listened (and responded to) a bunch of my feedback, adding email frequency options, an RSS feed, and other useful tweaks. They gave me a (welcome) opportunity to test new features.
Tweetshelf - Tweetshelf is similar to Murmel but also has some differences. Tweetshelf does have a free account, but also a paid version. Again, I encourage paying for these services. Tweetshelf's premium plan, similar in pricing to Murmel's basic plan, is pretty robust, including multiple Twitter accounts, and list tracking. Tweetshelf was responsive to me via Twitter. Tweetshelf did add RSS to their premium plan after my Twitter feedback. I really like some of the creativity Tweetshelf is applying here, including being able to track content by category (e.g. videos), and also their obvious mobile app chops, for those who want that. However, I'm not a customer so I can't speak to how well it all works. Why not? Well, because Tweetshelf requires premium account activation within their mobile app, and I'm not sure I want another news/curation app on my phone at the moment. I'm also not crazy about 'thumbing' in payment info on my phone. To me, that's what a desktop web site is for. If they make it possible to try premium online, I'll do it and report back.
Feedly with Twitter - this article is pretty useful for those who already use Feedly as their newsreader. I don't, and it's a tad geeky to organize, but looks fairly useful. In some cases, it's helpful to not only have the most popular tweets from a feed, but all the tweets from a feed. Example: tracking your own tweets or replies can be useful, or tracking all the tweets from a key client or contact. I use a paid service, RSS.app, for custom Twitter RSS feeds.
My take - paid curation services are maturing
It's encouraging to see the maturation of paid curation and bookmarking services. Investing our time in free services, only to get the Google Reader bait and switch, is a waste. Personally, while I understand why a service like Nuzzel would go the acquisition route, I like investing in curation services from companies that want a long-term, self-sufficiency play. That said, you never know.
If you've noticed, Facebook and LinkedIn are missing from this roundup. Alas, both of these platforms are black boxes, though LinkedIn even moreso than Facebook. With Facebook, you can still pull content out of pages via feeds. With LinkedIn, there are no feeds, no way to determine the popularity of content in your network outside of LinkedIn's dubious notification system and algorithmic surfacing.
In other words, to get something out of these social curation services, you have to invest some time in Twitter. Whether you want to compile any dedicated lists is another question. For most of us, just pulling from our overall follower network is probably enough. But, if you have multiple and distinct specializations, you might want to take the trouble to compile lists (e.g. retail influencers), for the sake of putting these services to work on top of them.
I made fun of "AI" at the beginning of this piece, but I do think AI could play a role in curation services over time. Depending on how you define AI, perhaps it already is. I would never rely on social curation tools, AI or otherwise, to take the place of RSS, where I impose my own algorithm based on the feeds I value. But, while I question the wisdom of crowds as an absolute, I follow some very smart peeps. Knowing these services track them, so I don't have to, is pretty handy.
This piece is part of my semi-regular diginomica series on productivity, filtering, and the art of content curation.
Image credit - Hand, tool and big walnut on wooden background. The concept of complex problems, the challenge can be solved. © sablinstanislav - Fotolia.com
Disclosure - I am a paying Murmel customer. I also use Thresholder bot, but it's free.
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