When you see a product that you know, but don’t expect being reviewed by both Jason Snell and Federico Vittci, it might give you a totality different approach on it. In this case, the product is Nuzzel.

What is Nuzzel?

Jason Snell introduces it way better that I could :

Nuzzel is a free web site and iOS app that mines your Twitter and Facebook networks and shows you the newest or most popular links. What Nuzzel does well is sort and filter and group the links in interesting ways, and present them as nicely formatted news-story items—not as tweets. The filtering makes a big difference. I can, for instance, see all links from the past four hours that have been recommended by two or more friends. This has a tendency to float the most interesting stuff to the very top.

What has changed?

You see, I’m a big RSS user. I’m a Feedbin member for a long time, and I pay subscriptions for websites just to have a full RSS feed (like for Ars Technica or Next Inpact, a French website). But there is a problem with RSS. I’m not interested in all Ars articles or The Verge ones, but they all get into my unread list. And, as a student, I have limited time. So, since I subscribe to a lot of feed (that I like), I often get to the point that I have more than 1000 new articles to read because I didn’t manage to read them all during the day; and that leads me to take at least 3-4 hours every weekends to clear the list (or give up and mark all as read). This is untenable, and it makes reading the news much more a pain that I genuinely get when my inbox is less cluttered (yep, I’m an Inbox 0 guy).

So let’s get back to Nuzzel.

When I subscribed to Nuzzel about 6 months ago, I saw clearly the benefits of the service, which was, at the time -and for me, an Android user-, a daily newsletter with a summary of the 5 articles the most shared by my Facebook friends and Twitter followers. Far for being a Twitter completist, I missed some great pieces well worth reading, and this saddened me a lot.

But my utilization of Nuzzel didn’t get past the morning newsletter, even when I got the iPhone and downloaded the app. So the usefulness of the service was very much limited. I’m sure that I wouldn’t notice if I didn’t got the daily digest for a week in my mailbox.

But the iPad app looks great on my iPad mini, and this might change something.

Anyways, I’m gonna try the iOS apps of Nuzzel for the coming week, and put my Feedbin account on diet. See you in the next episode!

And if you have any advices on RSS and stuff, just send be a tweet or an email. Thanks!

Re/Code :

Apple and GT Advanced Technologies struck an agreement on Tuesday that will let GT begin the shutdown of key Arizona operations and will shed some more light on why the former stock market darling abruptly filed for bankruptcy this month.

So it seems that we’re about to know what really happened in this case. This should give us some insight about Apple’s manufacturing deals with it’s parteners, if GT did or did not meet the expectations (and what were they), and under how much pressure was GT on.

Or, you know, there’s could be nothing.

Glenn Fleishman, writing for Six Colors :

The same principles that motivated Netflix to sign the Sandler deal should motivate Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft to do the same thing—only for fiber-optic broadband Internet service in the United States, and maybe elsewhere. And for nearly the same reason. “Dear sir,” I hear you cry over the interwebs, “You’ve lost your mind.” No, no, hear me out, folks. As these tech giants find themselves increasingly dependent on Internet service providers like Comcast, AT&T, Cablevision, and Verizon, and with those companies wanting “fast-lane” exemptions to network neutrality rules (which are murky at the moment following court decisions) the easy way to keep a connection to consumers without being at the mercy of the broadband providers is to build it themselves.

Great article about net neutrality, and Google foray into the world of ISPs. Glenn is such a talented writer, and manage here to explain something complicated with a dubious analogy including Adam Sandler.

If you’re not familiar with the terms “Net Neutrality”, or asking yourself why did Google build a fiber service in Kansas City, and expanding it in Provo or Austin, this should really help you. If you already know why, read it too. And you should kickstart the Year 2 anthology of The Magazine, the publication created by Marco Arment and now edited by Glenn Fleishman.

Federico Viticci :

iOS 8.1 brings bug fixes, speed improvements, and interface changes, but it also enables Continuity features such as Text Message Forwarding and Instant Hotspot, allowing iOS devices to better integrate with each other and Macs running OS X Yosemite. With iOS 8.1, Apple is opening access to its iCloud Photo Library beta – an iCloud service that stores all your photos from all your devices, in a single library that relays changes to every device. And last, iOS 8.1 marks the debut of Apple Pay, the company’s new payment service that rolls out in the US today.

If you kinda loose track of what new features is bringing iOS 8.1, this MacStories article from Federico Vittci is, as usual, great.

For me, I’m pretty exited for the “Text Message Forwarding feature”, which will bring the ability to respond to my SMS friends (the majority) directly from my iPad, and, someday, my hypothetical Mac.

I just activated the iPhoto Cloud Library to see the improvements (and it’s uploading a lot of files), but this is not a feature that I’m particularly exited for, since I already back up my photos with Carousel (from Dropbox) and OneDrive (thanks to my 1 To storage space from my Office 365 subscription), so not a big deal from now. But we’ll see the Apple implementation.

Also, the big feature that I’m waiting for is Apple Pay, but unfortunately, it’s not available in Europe, and, anyways, since I have an iPhone 5, I’m not eligible to it. I’d like to see if it’s worth the upgrade to an iPhone 6.

Anyways, I hope you’ll enjoy the update!

Edit : Oh, and if you’re looking for an extensive changelog of the update, Jason Snell of Six Colors got you covered.