Twitter kills my second most used app Nuzzel – thanks for nothing

Twitter announced today that they will be acquiring Scroll and this version of Nuzzel will be shutting down on May 6, 2021. […] we’ll be working with Twitter to figure out how the best of Nuzzel should be expressed in 2021. In the meantime, Nuzzel’s app, site and email service will go dark.

Yesterday Scroll, the owner of the service and app Nuzzel, informed me, that they will shut down both of them tomorrow. And that they were acquired by Twitter – but who gives a fuck to a company that screwed most of its acquisitions in full Google style. This is another nail in the coffin from a company that successfully killed most of their third-party clients and is used as a Pandora’s box from the evil lords of the world. #MajorBummer

What is Nuzzel?

I’ve lost track how Nuzzel and later Scroll positioned the Nuzzel app. But for me it was the second app I use each morning after checking my “Important” Twitter List in the best 3rd party Twitter client on this planet: Twitterrific. While I am more or less asleep, the about 600 people I follow on Twitter are firing off Tweets at such a volume, that it would cost me 1+ hour each morning to read them. I know, I know, Twitter is a dive-in and dive-out medium but I am feeling obligated to be a completionist at least for my “Important” Twitter list with around 40 members and (this is where it gets important) my Nuzzel timeline for 2+ friends.

Nuzzel has a nice feature where it generates a kind of link feed with previews based on links that haven been shared on Twitter twice or more. (This could be fine-tuned up to 10+ friends.) The idea is, that if something import gets shared more than once, it is really important according to the curated list of people I follow. With this setup of an “Important” Twitter list and the Nuzzel 2+ feed I rarely miss anything that might happened while I was asleep. Even during the day, after longer working intervals, I glance at the Nuzzel feed to get an update about the important stuff.

The Nuzzel app was updated a year ago – that tells a lot how loved it is by their former parents Scroll. Therefore I won’t believe a word, that something good will come from the gang bang with Twitter. And if, Twitter will surely force me to use their shitty app – no dice.

Quo vadis?

I tried to force a developer friend into developing something for me, but Twitter’s hostility towards developers let every potential project taste like cool aid. So no luck on this front.

My last straw of hope is a project called RSSHub, which in theory could generate an RSS feed of the Tweets from people I follow. This might be a basis for some kind of self-developed Web-based RSS reader app, that collects only the links from these Tweets, counts if they have been posted more than twice in the last 24 hours and if so, generate another RSS feed with only those links. I then could subscribe to this aggregated link RSS feed with an RSS app on my iPhone and have something roughly similar to Nuzzel. In theory. If I have the time. And the skills. Luck. Nerves. Etc.

PS Maybe a little bit more could be done with RSSHub and I won’t need a second RSS aggregator and could get the links directly within RSSHub. For 3rd party Twitter clients there seems to be a way of reading the links within a Tweet – but I have now idea if these are exposed to RSSHub. So if anybody is up in arms about the killing of Nuzzel and is up to the challenge of developing a similar or even better successor: take my money. PLEASE!!!