Introducing Zite, the iPad’s Smartest Magazine Yet

Watch out, Flipboard. As of Wednesday, you have some serious competition: a free app called Zite that is constantly learning what you like to read on the iPad and creating a magazine finely tailored to your needs.
Many iPad owners who have used the free Flipboard app for any length of time are familiar with its promise and its shortcomings. Sure, it looks cool — enter your Twitter name and Facebook account, and it turns those feeds into a magazine, complete with gorgeous photos, headlines and virtually flippable pages. That’s why Apple named it iPad app of the year for 2010. The app also offers its own curated news feeds and can now plug into your Flickr account.
But how often do you actually read it? Does Flipboard really help you discover content that got buried in your Twitter feed overnight? How’s that unfiltered Facebook feed in magazine form working out for you?
“What’s broken is there’s so much stuff out there, and I don’t know how to get to it,” says Ali Devar, Zite’s founder and CEO. “There’s no automatic system that’s catching the important stuff I miss every day. Search doesn’t solve it. Social doesn’t solve it. A lot of [Zite beta testers] came back to us and said, ‘Thank goodness, here’s something that gives me my content and more, but filters it for me.’ People are feeling the pain, and they need it resolved.”
Zite pulls in stories from your Twitter feed, if you wish, or your Google Reader account. Neither are necessary. You can also choose from hundreds of topics you’re interested in or start with the plain-vanilla version of the magazine. That also is not required. Every story comes with thumbs up and thumbs down icons and a button to request more of that kind of story. But none of this is truly important.
The app’s secret sauce is this: It learns from your everyday reading. It’s constantly watching what kind of stories you click on, how long those stories are, how long you’re reading them for — and just as importantly, the stories you don’t click on. (It’ll give you less of those.) Just as Netflix and Amazon bring you movies and products that users similar to you liked, Zite is doing constant behind-the-scenes comparisons between readers, both inside the app and on the web in general.
“You should be able to notice right away that Zite is giving you stories that are meaningful to you,” says Devar.
Devar’s eight-employee team is drawn from researchers at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, specifically its Laboratory for Computational Intelligence. That academic know-how is part of Zite’s DNA in the same way that Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s graduate project in computer science at Stanford gave birth to Google. Spend any amount of time with Devar, who has all of Page’s excitable geekiness, and he’ll talk your ear off about machine learning and how advanced it’s going to get over the next 20 years.
But what you get on the surface is a clean, easy-to-read collection of stories and photos without too many geeky bells and whistles. That’s because Devar and his team spent the last five years taking as many features out of Zite as they put in. “We were looking for ways to include a search engine, but that broke the product,” says Devar. “It took away from the Zen of it. For an initial launch, what you want to have is the simplest product. The less the user does, the better.”

According to a recent survey by the Reynolds Journalism Institute, 88% of iPad owners use their tablets to keep up with news and current events — the most frequently cited use. So with the number of iPad owners climbing to 15 million and showing no signs of slowing down — especially with Friday’s launch of the iPad 2 — the field of news aggregation apps is likely to become an increasingly lucrative one. Devar talks disinterestedly about revenue sharing deals and excitedly about display ads and how marketers are just beginning to understand how good they can look on an iPad.
The simple fact is the news app that can get you launching it over and over will win, and Zite is a strong early contender for the title. Given the strong assist Zite has from some of the planet’s smartest machine learning experts, it’s going to be interesting to see how, or whether, Flipboard can ever catch up.