Flipboard is acquiring Zite from CNN | Hacker News Reader

Flipboard is acquiring Zite from CNN

gigaom.com

49 pointsrobdoherty236 comments

This is a real shame. Zite is fabulous and useful whereas flipboard is annoying. I long ago uninstalled flipboard because of the failed real world metaphor. I don't need my software apps trying to ape a dead technology of dead trees. Zite is fabulous, modern and highly usable.

I'm glad for the people involved if this is a good exit for them, but as a user I'm worried that flipboard will ruin things.

I agree - I vastly preferred Zite to anything else. I have Flipboard, Inside, Prismatic installed, but I use Zite 90% of the time.

http://glui.me/?i=j6drkkursw1qwn9/2014-03-05_10.45.58.png/

I found the Zite learning algorithm worked really well for me (as opposed to Prismatic). I always found the content really relevant + enjoyable to read.

Looks like they are shutting Zite down: http://variety.com/2014/digital/news/cnn-sells-zite-news-app...

That just ruined my lunch. Seriously, Zite is awesome, only "recommender" that actually works for me. Prismatic, Flipboard, everything else I've tried--they all suck. Only Zite consistently gives me things I haven't seen that I'm actually interested in.

Welp, time to dust off my recommender algorithms and build something I suppose. If anyone's interested in joining, ping me.

FWIW, our plan is to integrate the Zite recommendation engine into Flipboard (and import your Zite data). I've love to have your feedback as we build it.

Can you try to at least leave Zite running before you finishing integrate zite algorithm into flipboard? What am I going to do in the meantime without Zite, sigh.

Flipboard is useless at its current state. Please explain this to your new boss. Really appreciate it.

Our every intention is to leave Zite running until we can build something at least as good at Flip. I know it's sad to lose a product you love (it's sadder to lose one you've built), but I'll try my hardest to make it up to you.

Agreed. Zite is so much better. I use Zite 2-3 times a day and have stopped using Flipboard.

Add me to the choir

I posted this in another thread, but this is my statement on the acquisition: http://blog.zite.com/2014/03/05/zite-is-flipping-out/

Happy to answer any questions.

Zite has been my app of choice when I'm catching up on the news over breakfast. It sounds like Flipboard is going to integrate Zite's personalization algorithms into Flipboard, but I'm skeptical. Hoping for the best.

A mix of Zite's better personalization options and Flipboard's better design would be perfect.

It would be really cool if they could make it work.

I installed Flipboard while looking for a replacement for the old Google Currents widget on my Nexus 7. Fb might be better for content, or not, but I still really miss the other widget. Swiping through headlines in Currents was almost fun, and I could preselect for content sources that would be available to read offline.

Ultimately, most of the content that's available is unremarkable, so I tend to be very critical of the overall experience of consuming it. Conversely, a source that makes even modest improvements in efficiency or presentation can instantly become part of my daily routine. The old Currents was far from perfect, but at least it felt like progress.

I just hope flipboard does not mean to shutdown zite. Zite is part of my life now, while I haven't open flipboard more than once or twice a week.

After watched the movie "her", I had thought about zite would be the Samantha in my news consumption world, "who" has tuned up and evolved very much to my taste over years. I could careless about flipboard's fancy layout.

This is the worst news after greader shutdown, wtf. Unfortunately trap.it doesn't quite work out, seriously limited my choice.

I'm a huge fan of Zite and use it every single day as my morning paper, lunch reading and late evening reading. I've tried Flipboard in the past but it didn't hold a candle to my needs like Zite did/does. I'm hoping that this doesn't spell the end of the Zite experience.

I am still using a HP Touchpad webOS tablet mostly because of some apps that I think are just great. Among them the webOS Zite client I think is the most polished client for that service in any platform. The Android client doesn't come near in usability. I just hope it keeps working...

My TouchPad is dual-boot and I think the webOS client was much better but most of the time I just run Zite on Android now.

Anyway, sad to see Zite go. It was so much better than Flipboard.

As a heavy user for both apps, I should say I am glad this is happening.

Though Flipboard and Zite may seem similar to each other from the first sight, underneath I think they take very different approaches.

From a user's perspective, I believe Zite relies more on an algorithmic approach while Flipboard is more hand-tuned. As a result, Flipboard has better article quality, a result from a controlled list of resources. Zite certainly covers wider topic spectrum, but I am bothered all the time when it recommends me something like a newsletter announcement for a product update, which becomes worse when you subscribe to a rare topic.

A better personalized Flipboard, with more channels to choose from, is the best outcome of this acquire.But I will miss the old Zite now and then.

Zite is a strong product, and I wish the team well. (Disclaimer: Mark Johnson is a friend, and deserves some time off.)

This is admittedly self-serving but appropriate for HN: If you're interested in an alternative, I quit my job at CBS yesterday to work on a new SF bay area startup that's aiming to provide personalized news with zero configuration. You can sign up to be notified of the beta at http://recent.io/

Bravo!

Thanks! It's exciting and kind of scary at the same time. Hope you like it (once it ships!).

in a past life I spent a lot of time concerned about how M&A would unfold in this space... This is interesting as we never had the sense Zite had particularly innovative tech, whereas Flipboard needed a 'horseman' to acquire them.

This may ultimately be more of a licensing/ partnership between CNN & Flipboard... In hindsight I wasted a lot of that time.

You're right that Zite has little innovative tech, but--for me--it just works slightly better in a variety of subtle ways that give it an edge over other apps. Sometimes that's all it takes.

For whatever it's worth, I use Zite pretty much everyday. It's like my morning paper. I don't use Flipboard at all. It's a nice app for sure, but for some reason, Zite always seemed to give me more interesting things to read.

Same here, so I hope we'll get to keep Zite with Flipbook's look.

Zite has a few serious UI issues, and it's a testament to how good it's actual recommendations are that it's still my most-used consumption source (other than HN).

As Zite's CTO, it's interesting to see how the tech is perceived externally.

For whom did you work in a previous life, out of curiousity?

I was part of two failed attempts at personalizing news/ creating communities of topic expertise around news. Both ended in the many tens of thousands of users, and acqui-hire talks (not with either Zite or Flipboard).

My thought on the tech was it was consistently good, the product was simple and easy to use, and worked very well at aggregating subject based articles (I'm sure there was much more behind the scenes that would have scared us at the time)...

we were trying to do not only the smart aggregation, but create hooks into reading communities to encourage an atmosphere like HN - instead of mystical karma points, you would see btrautsc; expert in X, knowledgable in Y, novice in Z and so forth. Like I said, it ultimately died a timely death.

Congratulations on the deal by the way!

Thanks btrautsc! The smart social reading experience sounds interesting even if it didn't work out.

quite welcome. and thank you, I'm in the bay area for the next few months, maybe we could connect sometime.

Sure. Email in profile.

I prefer Zite over Flipboard. That whole flipping UI thing just never sat right with me.

Anyone here think's the "Technology" stories in Zite are just HN's RSS feed?

Yes, I've always suspected that.. It's either that or a really good 'personal recommendation engine'.

It's not, but we trained the classifier+collaborative filter, and we're all HN readers, so it's not surprising it picks up HN stories consistently.

Hopefully they will fix this mess which is Zite on Android.

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