The digital news magazine app Pulse has always been good at making sense of the many information sources available online, but now it wants to cull the insanity of your social circle to find only the most popular articles and links.

Today the service is rolling out a new feature called Pulse Highlights that you use to create a tab of news based on what’s popular among those in your social circle. Basically, any news story that your friends have shared or saved excessively will pop up within the new Highlights tab, which you can access from the “save stories” tab in the left sidebar.

The new feature is basically an iteration of what the old version of Digg (pre-Betaworks) attempted (and failed) to do. You can also think of Pulse Highlight as a curator similar to Facebook, only showing you the news stories and shared links from within a feed based on your reading habits and interactions with the social network. However, Pulse may be able to put a fresh spin on things since its focused entirely on news stories rather than all social interactions.

“Is a story’s worth based on number of shares? We believe in quality over quantity: We don’t think an article needs 500-plus ‘likes’ to make it interesting, inspiring, or share-worthy,” said Pulse founder Akshay Kothari about the new feature. “Highlights is based on your personal network, so if a close friend or family member cares about a story, you’ll see it in your feed.”

Stories that appear in the Highlights tab show who initially shared the posts, and you can track conversations about them via push notifications. You can also add posts to the Highlights tab or share to your social networks.

The new features is available today via Android devices and should roll out to iOS devices in the near future.

CNN’s $20 million acquisition of Zite bore its first fruit today with the launch of the news curation feature CNN Trends.

CNN Trends is prominently located at the top of the CNN homepage navigation bar, and it uses technology developed by Zite to identify the top 10 CNN stories per day, along with a list of additional sources from around the web. It’s very similar to how Zite curates news within its mobile and tablet applications, which uses a mix of user feedback and algorithms.

The main difference with CNN Trends is that a piece of original CNN content anchors every top story. You can select a particular topic for a list of top stories, all with their own top 10 posts. Each individual post can open up an expanded view with headlines from other websites that have also covered the news — sort of like Google News or TechMeme.

“We aren’t afraid of letting our (readers) make their own decision for where to go for a news story,” said CNN SVP of Digital KC Estenson in an interview with VentureBeat. “Maybe they go to GigaOM or VentureBeat for a particular story, but the goal is to have them start with CNN Trends, and come back after they’ve read that other content.”

Estenson said CNN’s website brings in 8 million to 10 million daily unique visitors and publishes hundreds of posts every day. The new CNN Trends feature, he said, is a great example for how the news organization is leveraging Zite and its team.

In the past, major news companies have trouble fitting in the valuable news curation services they purchase within existing business models. (Such as MSNBC’s purchase of social news curation site Newsvine in 2007 or Gannett’s purchase of local news aggregator Topix.) Even ultra-popular socially curated news sites like Reddit (under Conde Nast) and StumbleUpon (under Yahoo) didn’t do well as satellite properties of major news organizations.

“We really set out to be the exception to the rule of failed acquisitions,” Estenson told me. “I’ve really pushed Zite to be independent and develop its own products to be as successful as it can,” while also asking Zite to address CNN’s own problems.

After using the CNN Trends service for a while, I do think its a nice solution for people who don’t normally like to click headline links for posts that are hot, trending, or related content in the sidebars. It’s certainly a different approach for a news organization that produces such a high volume of content every day, too, and one that could end up boosting loyal readership.

As for CNN Trends, Zite CEO Mark Johnson said this is very much a first step. “In the future you’ll see us trying to gather more information about the individual user experience so we can tailor CNN Trends as a tool” that gives you precisely what you’re looking for.

For Twitter users, the social network has become the ultimate source of news. Abrams, the site’s founder, said that the idea has been brewing for a few years, and he frequently turns to Twitter as a source for tech-related content.

On Nuzzel, you sign in with Twitter, and the site gets to work in seconds, aggregating news that your friends are posting. Most of us aren’t on Twitter all the time, so it shows you top stories that you may have missed. My news feed primarily consists of tech and startup news, as I primarily follow people in industry. In its current form, Nuzzel appeals to those that follow a more diverse range of people on Twitter; they’ll encounter the full spectrum of news.

Abrams, who didn’t raise any funds for his latest venture, developed and designed the site single-handedly. He plans to raise a round of seed funding in the coming months and to recruit a technical team to build out the product.

Social news aggregators are a dime a dozen; Nuzzel competes with News.me (folded into Digg) and Summify (acquired by Twitter), as well as beautifully designed news curation apps like Pulse.me and Flipboard. These startups are direct competitors when Abrams launches its mobile version, no doubt already in the works. For an analysis of the social news curation space after Digg’s acquisition, check out this Wall Street Journal piece.

Still, Abrams says he has a very different vision for the site, “which will eventually become clear.” I have to hand it to him: The site is easy to use and is highly intuitive, very impressive given that this is a bootstrapped effort.

“We all need help managing the overload of social sharing, but we don’t want to miss anything either,” said Abrams, hinting at the future direction of the product. “That’s why Nuzzel matters.” Currently you’ll find a “news you may have missed” section on the site’s clean layout, which shows stories shared by friends of friends, or by the people followed by the people you follow. It exposes you to a broader mix of news.

Abrams won’t have any trouble raising funds for this latest venture. He is the visionary entrepreneur behind Friendster, and he runs the Founders Den workspace with Data Collective‘s Zach Bogue. Prior startups include a social network Socializr (acquired by competitor, Punchbowl), and social bookmarking service HotLinks.

No longer are people restricted from searching content within a set of about 500 topics, which was the site’s previous standard for searching. The new search engine-like functionality is far more dynamic.

“Can we do for discovery what others have done for search,” said StumbleUpon VP of Business Development and Marketing Marc Leibowitz in an interview with VentureBeat. “We think there’s a big opportunity here.”

One of the intentions behind Explore Box is to open up StumbleUpon to a whole new audience of people that use the site in different ways, according to Leibowitz. By doing so, the site’s discovery ability will improve over time.

“Hundreds of thousands of interests are now waiting to be explored. For example, let’s say you need some ideas for this weekend’s barbecue. Type “grilling” into the Explore Box, and we’ll inspire you with mouth-watering photos recommended by grilling aficionados and delight you with recipes that will make you the star of the party,” wrote StumbleUpon senior product manager Xian Ke on the company’s blog.

A beta version of the Explore Box feature is available on StumbleUpon’s web app today. Mobile versions, which is of increasing interest to the company according to Director of Communications Mike Mayzel, will get the Exploe Box functionality with a month or so.