Zite is a personalized magazine app for iPad that pulls from your Twitter feed and/or your Google Reader to create a magazine based on stuff you are evidently interested in. Like a fully honed periodical that barely stretches your horizon and instead gives you an editorial feedback loop. So: hooray! It’s new and it’s a competitor to Flipboard, which has been around for a while now. As is the case with search engines, the success of these apps seems to all depend on the algorithm: how good is the device at finding stuff that’s pertinent and interesting. Zite is free. And a ridiculous word. Like Zune.
It figures out what you consider interesting according to your Twitter or Google Reader accounts, then fills your magazine with stories about similar topics. It also tracks and learns from user behavior as people open stories (or don’t), so if users just read a story on Zite, its personalization still works. With each story a user reads, he or she can opt to indicate they like a story, want to see more of one or all of the individual topics covered in that story, or want to see more from the source of that story. Zite then makes suggestions according to that knowledge. So your Zite magazine will never be exactly like mine.
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