Zite | Your Personalized Magazine
One thing Internet technologies have brought us over time is the increasing ability to create customizable or personalized content for ourselves. It started as basic as signing up for a newsletter from your favorite site to customizing a profile to display particular topics. Then we took a giant leap with social media integration. We could now not only see content we were aware of but we could discover new content via our friends and their friends. With all this information laid out in front us there was a massive creation of information overload – laying the grown work for diluted content. In stepped Zite.
Zite, which was acquired by CNN in late 2011, is a personalized magazine to help clean up all that content overload we deal with on the web when trying to catch up on the days current events and instead delivers content based on your personal interest. I recently got the chance to catchup with Zite’s CEO Mark Johnson during this year’s South By Southwest (SXSW) conference in Austin, TX. Mark and I had quite the chat about everything from Zite to Bloody Marys to where all the fun was at SXSW (interview above).
As a user of Zite, its been my first go-to application for getting my daily digest of what’s going on in the world. Sure sites like The Huffington Post, Twitter, and others convery great content but they often become overly time-consuming or don’t provided what you’re looking for. Zite works with what’s coming in via my Google Reader and Twitter accounts to choses the specific content that I would want to read most. Outside of my social account I’m able to choose additional topics to be added to my magazine such as Politics or Wine. With other mobile apps your usually at the grace of what’s in your feed and only that. However this personalized magazine puts in the effort and discovers new content for me based on my interactions with the articles I’m reading. So no longer do I have scour for new content, instead Zite delivers it to me.
Zite is now available for free across Android, HP webOS, and iPhone.
