Jim Edwards of Business Insider writes:

A few days ago, the Silicon Valley investor Chris Sacca was talking on Periscope about Nuzzel, the newsgathering app. He said Twitter should just go ahead and buy Nuzzel outright. It would fix a lot of problems for Twitter.

That's because Nuzzel does the one thing that Twitter doesn't do: organise content in tweets based on their importance. Looking at your Twitter account is often a random experience, a stream of consciousness of what your friends have on their minds right now, interesting or not.

"Random" is not the same as "useful." 

So Nuzzel takes that feed (and feeds from Facebook and other social media) and only shows you the news stories your friends are sharing. The result is amazingly interesting, and requires zero effort: You get a feed of headlines that feel much closer and more relevant to what you're interested in, because they're being tweeted or shared by friends, family, and coworkers. Nuzzel's friends-of-friends feed is often even more interesting because it surfaces stuff from further afield, stuff you didn't even know was news but is buzzing on the outer edge of your social sphere

Sacca — who is one of Twitter's largest investors, and who recently wrote a manifesto about how to fix Twitter — sees it this way: "Nuzzel makes Twitter better."

He is not alone in that opinion. Christopher Mims of the Wall Street Journal recently wrote, "Before I ever open Twitter, I open Nuzzel, a Twitter client app that digests my Twitter feed for me, showing me the most popular links in my network in the past 24 hours. Nuzzel can be tuned in a number of ways, but this default behaviour more than suffices. By putting an algorithm between me and the firehose of Twitter, Nuzzel makes Twitter usable for a mere mortal."

I use it too.

So I decided to interview Jonathan Abrams face to face (via video) to find out what it's like being the CEO of the company everyone thinks can fix everything that's wrong with Twitter.

In San Francisco, Abrams is a minor celebrity. He was the founder of Hotlinks and Socializr, a co-owner of the San Francisco nightclub Slide, and he's now a managing partner at Founders' Den, the office-space/private club for entrepreneurs.

Could the folks from Friendster save Twitter?

But most famously he was the founder of Friendster, the social network that was a forerunner to Facebook, which flamed out of existence after amassing more than 100 million members. Its assets were sold to a Malaysian company, which pivoted the company into a gaming network.

What's interesting about the Friendster story — which many people dismiss, because it failed so publicly before being superseded by Facebook, a largely similar platform  — is that Friendster's patents were sold for $40 million, more than the value of the company ... to Facebook.

And now Abrams is back, with $3.4 million in investment funding from backers such as Lowercase Capital (Sacca), Zachary Bogue (sometimes referred to as Mr. Marissa Mayer), and Andreessen Horowitz. His COO is Kent Lindstrom, the former COO of Friendster.

So Abrams is having a bit of a moment: Twitter is looking for a new CEO now that Dick Costolo is leaving. Everyone thinks Twitter ought to acquire Nuzzel and use its skills to improve the Twitter newsfeed experience. And Abrams does, in fact, have experience being a CEO for a very large social media company.

We're not saying he wants the job, of course! Just that he's qualified for it, on paper.

The full interview:

http://businessinsider.com/interview-with-nuzzel-ceo-jonathan-abrams-2015-6

Huh... so a guy who is famous mostly for failing to be a good CEO for a 50 person company... is WITH NO BIGGER EXPERIENCE gonna be super good for a public company? Do women and minorities get to do this kind of thing too?!?!? Or MAYBE Chris Sacca is putting up a straw man that others can knock down? NICE way to treat your alleged buddies! Definitely want to be one of them! Cronyism is not quite what I expected, but the struggle is real!

You're like StartupLJackson but fishier!

Marc Andreessen called the Business Insider piece a great interview with a legendary innovator:

https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/611830233629507584