Zite: The Best Tool for Finding the Content You Want to Read

March 20, 2012 by

I started using the iPad app Zite a few months ago and liked it. It was the only iPad "news" app that I found useful at all after trying a whole bunch of alternatives including Pulse, News.me, and Flipboard. 

In the last few weeks I have started using Zite every day. I prefer it now over Google Reader, Facebook, and every other source of information I was using except for Twitter. Twitter still has the timeliness factor over Zite and that is important to me… for the moment. 

I've converted  to Zite because it is first application or web site that I trust will deliver me the content I want to see. Up to now I have had to own that process by following people or sites, setting up lists, and constantly looking for new sources. Zite relieves me of that duty to a great degree. Thank God! In many ways it is a glimpse of the future of content discovery around the internet, and eventurally within smaller silos including fine grained subject areas and web sites. It is so good that users are going to demand this type of service everywhere in the not too distant future just like they demand site search engines to "be like Google".

LonePlacebo explains why Zite is different from other apps:

What sets Zite apart from other news aggregators is that it gets smarter as it learns from your reading activity. Not only does it feature the most shared stories on your favorite topics, it continuously fine-tunes the content is finds for you to better match your preferences. Whenever you read an article on Zite, you can indicate your rating by giving it a thumbs up or down. So, if you start reading and giving positive ratings for articles from say, Arstechnica, Zite’s algorithm will adapt the content to deliver more articles from the site. The same would apply for sites you dislike.

Here's some of the reasons I am using it more:

  • It has topics that I am highly interested in and seek out like: technology, movies, gadgets, SEO, and science. It does a great job at covering these topics for me on a daily basis in a way that leaves me feeling that I don't really need to go anywhere else. In this way, it has replaced Google Reader and part of Twitter for me.
  • It also has great content in areas that I would like to learn more about but had yet to find a flow of information that had worked for me. Areas like: architecture, art history, and archaeology. I am using it as a learning tool.
  • It is learning what I like and changing the content it is showing to me. I have noticed the improvement in finding new content for me. I have to sift through less content that I am not interested in now.
  • I find content that I would otherwise not come across in how I was normally using the internet. It is by far the best discovery tool I have found for serendipitous experiences. 
  • It is tightly integrated with other social media and reading apps and allows for very easy sharing, reading later, and bookmarking. 

The one issue I've had with it is that they don't have all the categories I'd like to see yet. At the TOC conference a few weeks ago I was at a session put on by the CEO of Zite, Mark Johnson, and he said they were working hard on adding more categories. I hope they add the Red Sox soon.

The Zite blog has a great post titled "Zite Under the Hood" that outlines how they create this experience:
 
The Zite team brings together decades of software development in artificial intelligence, machine learning and natural language technologies, and more than six years of product development, to blend and tune the experience for you. In short, Zite works by: 
  • mining content from your social web
  • modeling that content
  • modeling the community that interacts with it
  • modeling your interests
  • matching your interests to the content and your community, to help you discover content you’ll want to see.
There's alot more detail in the full post including this diagam that shows how it works at a high level:
 

In what was seen as a somewhat shocking move at the time, CNN acquired Zite late last year:

“Zite is a sort of modern newsstand,” CNN Digital Senior Vice President K.C. Estenson told me. It’s the place where you come first to browse the news that might interest you, after which you continue to the specific publications that caught your eye.
 
“That notion of discovery … applies in the tablet and mobile marketplace as well, and so we saw in Zite an opportunity to be in the middle of all of that,” Estenson said.
 
CNN chose to acquire Zite because it was the best technology in its class and had an excellent team of employees behind it. And CNN couldn’t build something like it in a short period of time, Estenson said.
 
Here's a quick video showing you the basics of the Zite iPad app:
 

 

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