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I build this service so I could be better in touch with my closest friends.

I wanted to eliminate some of the noise of Twitter and focus on people I care the most.

Please let me know what you think about it, I hope you like it

Looks like a good app but I would never build anything for Twitter. Just my opinion.
After the API restrictions and they way they treated developer you mean?
Or you could just only follow the people you are actually interested in.
That's true, but I like opening twitter for serendipitous discovery from a large network of people.

but I also want to be more in touch with people who are very close to me

failing that, use lists.
True.

With list you still need to scroll a timeline, and you don't really know when nothing is new. In other words. You still need to check twitter all the time.

With Essence you get a daily digest. That's it

Looks pretty cool. You probably want to at least show me what I will receive in my email before making me actually verify my email address though.

What I would really want though is a twitter client that will condense all the missed tweets since the last time I checked my feed (for which my close friends would be an important factor.)

You should probably also consider doing that for multiple platforms, which would give you something similar to Flipboard rather than yet-another-client-at-the-mercy-of-Twitter's-whims.

What I found from using this product in the past few weeks is that it helped me re-engage with the people I missed their tweets, either by replying or clicking through the links.

Twitter also has the dailiy / weekly digest functions, but it's organized by most popular tweets (https://twitter.com/settings/notifications). Sometimes I just want to know what my cousin back home or an ex-colleague tweeted about, which is useful for.

One thing I'd like to see is to make more than one list, or be able to set email digest for some of my existing lists.

Great Job! Have you ever thought to have a similar filter for Facebook? Keep going and good luck!
would love to make it happen
We built something like this a little while ago that does the same thing for Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram: http://followbot.me/
Nice I didn't know about it, please connect with me over on twitter @gdonelli, would love to talk
I expected this to automatically determine my VIPs from my favorite, retweets and interactions. Making me select the people I want to add as VIPs isn't that much more beneficial than just having a Twitter list.
Good idea.

The followers are currently sorted according to who you interact the most. But it is not obvious.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but can't you just make a twitter list containing only your VIPs and check that when you want to find out? If I'm not mistaken, all this service does is email you the contents of a twitter list once a day...?
Yes, that's true.

The problem with timelines is that you need to check them all the time to see if anything has changed. Also managing a list on twitter is not great, i found.

An excellent idea. Most of my Twitter consumption now happens from the news.me daily email. This sounds very similar.

Has anyone used both? How do they compare?

I think I had a similar service before when I used Paper.li... but haven't really used it that much in awhile.
I like the idea, but I'm starting to get a lot of this daily recap emails...And if just one of your VIPS has had several discussions on twitter on a specific day, you'll still need to scan through all that. We need only the interesting tweets from our VIPS ;)

I'm going to stick to using lists (not perfect, but easy to check out on Tweetbot).

With list you still need to scroll a timeline, and you don't really know when something is new. In other words. You still need to check twitter all the time.

With Essence you are assured you never see duplicates from tweets from your VIPs

I like this idea. Great job!!

However, Twitter already sends emails out of tweets that are popular in your network. My only concern is that they could easily shut your service down & do the same thing as your app if they wanted to.