Jonathan Abrams: We haven’t figured it out yet. But that’s a very good example of the kind of thing that having these folks as part of the Nuzzel team will help us with.

We are pretty much Silicon Valley and Internet veterans. I began my career in Silicon Valley working at Netscape. I started Friendster, the original social network. So, we’re pretty savvy folks about social, and we’ve got a great list of Silicon Valley investors. But they’re all tech nerds, too. You know, Andreessen Horowitz and so on. We are not traditional news and media folks, and there are fans of Nuzzel all over the place, including at some very well known news and media companies. We thought getting these folks as some of our investors would be good because they can then help advise us on stuff related to, for example, working with publishers.

A few months ago, we announced a platform on Nuzzel where people could build custom feeds. These were feeds that were based on a Twitter list, and they could be used for any number of purposes. If we build a feed that’s about fertility, or bitcoin, or something, what we’re not doing is semantic analysis, and scanning keywords in articles. Nor are we using human editors to review stuff by hand. What we do is still related to Nuzzel’s approach, which is based on social curation. We take a list of people who are influencers who tweet about a topic. We pump that through Nuzzel’s technology, and out comes a Nuzzel feed.

It’s not limited to topics. It could be all the people who work at BuzzFeed or The New York Times, but topical ones work too. And when we built feeds like this, sometimes it surfaced content from niche vertical blogs that are not necessarily mainstream, but often, mainstream content was also surfaced. We quickly realized that every day The New York Times, USA Today, The Guardian, CNN, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, etc. are publishing hundreds and hundreds of pieces of content. And if you have a specific interest in, you know, fertility, or libraries, or bitcoin, or whatever it is and there’s a really interesting or funny article relevant to that audience in The New York Times, or CNN, or The Guardian in the last 24 hours, you probably didn’t find it. Because most people don’t use RSS readers or any tools to go through the news. Less than 1 percent of people who read news online really use tools like that. They’ve all been too complicated.

If you look on Facebook, your’e going to find lowest-common denominator stuff. And if The New York Times published a funny story last week and you go to their homepage, you’re not going to find that story either.

So this could be beneficial to publishers in terms of helping them get audience to the right content in a way that I don’t think is happening on Facebook or any of these other platforms. That’s something that we noticed, and now we’ve got these new investors to help advise us. Exactly what we’re going to do is something that we’re still going to figure out over the next year.

Another thing is that a lot of publishers and news companies have asked to meet with us. This happens all the time. We’re trying to figure out a way that we can work with them. Do we publish some sort of syndicated Nuzzel feed or widgets that they can use with us? Those are things we’re interested in and we haven’t figured this out. These are things that it seems like there’s interest in, and these are things that we’re going to be working on in the next year.

Abrams: We really do get every week some major media company emailing us and asking us to meet. It’s a few things: They’re all trying to figure out — especially the old-school ones, the newspapers versus the BuzzFeeds — what’s going on this world of social and the new world of mobile. Nuzzel is a tiny six-person company, but we’re pretty savvy with mobile and with social. Our app, obviously, is in both of those worlds. They’ll just have people at their company using Nuzzel, they hear good things, they hear we’re innovating in mobile and social, and they want to come and ask us what we’re doing and learn a bit about it.

Nuzzel is headquartered at Founders’ Den, which is a coworking space in San Francisco that I started, and we have the same thing where big huge companies or governments from other companies want to come by Founders’ Den to learn about Silicon Valley. So some of these big news companies and media companies want to hear a little bit about our insights into mobile and social. Then sometimes it’s a bit more specific — sometimes I think there is some potential interest in actually doing something with us: maybe using our platform to build feeds about topics or to use Nuzzel to showcase their writers’ or personalities’ curation in a way they could subscribe to. It’s a few things, but all this type of stuff is not something that we’ve really productized yet. We launched our iPhone app only about a year ago, Android more recently. Probably over the next year we may move forward with some actual product stuff that can enable some partnerships with publishers, but that’s something that we haven’t really fleshed out yet.

Abrams: Facebook drives a lot of traffic, but what they are not doing is I think connecting people with the stuff they really need to know about. If you go on Facebook, you’re seeing a lot of stuff — it’s stuff that’s going viral amongst a lot of people you know — but it’s not really the stuff you need to know in the way I think Nuzzel provides.

Apple’s new News app is cool. It seems very, very different than what Nuzzel does. They’re probably complementary, but it definitely doesn’t do any of the things that Nuzzel does. I think that it’s very interesting times in the world of online news. It’s fascinating. There’s so much going on, but what I think Nuzzel is doing is pretty unique. We’re trying to connect people with the stuff they really need to know about, instead of trying to provide personalized news without having to do a lot of work. I still don’t see anyone else going after this with the same philosophy.

Abrams: Right now, we’ve had a pretty Twitter-centric experience on Nuzzel, and one of the things that we think is that there’s an opportunity with those types of feeds I mentioned earlier. As Nuzzel becomes more and more of a platform to host those kinds of feeds, we think we can do a better job of letting people who don’t necessarily know how to use Twitter use Nuzzel by consuming feeds that other people have created. We’re moving in that direction.

It’s funny — we’ve been doing a lot of innovative stuff with push alerts using Android and iPhone, which is obviously a pretty new technology, but at the same time, we’re also very focused on email, which is very old technology. We recently changed our email template, and we’re planning to do even more stuff with email and more stuff with mobile push. Basically, we want to be cross-platform.

In some ways they’re similar and in some ways they’re very different. Mobile push notifications is a very mobile-focused and pretty new channel, and I think what we’ve done with push notifications is different than a lot of news apps that send everyone the same alerts. But we also think that email remains a very relevant channel for news. There’s something that’s pretty natural about getting a news digest in your email every morning. We’re continuing to do more stuff on both of those.

Abrams: We’re thinking about it, and we have plans for it, but we’re not actually working on it yet. We’re still focused on distribution and growth for now. We’re probably not going to be focused on generating revenue for awhile. We have plans for what we want to do there.

We think that if we become a platform where people are getting these feeds — and whether they’re getting them on mobile or email, they’re very targeted — you’re getting a librarian feed, or a fertility feed, or whatever, and there are a lot of opportunities for very targeted, relevant advertising. And for us, the advertising isn’t really the kind of stuff that ad blockers would strip out, that really annoying stuff. It’s more like an ad on Google, where it’s actually relevant to the other content you’re looking for and it’s in the stream, rather than getting in the way of the content you’re looking for.