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News aggregator Zite is closing down, users told to use Flipboard

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November 22, 2015

Zite, a very popular news aggregator among legal professionals is shutting its doors. Users are being told to use Flipboard, which bought Zite from CNN in 2014. All data should be migrated over to Flipboard before December 7.

The best way to describe Zite is as a Pandora for content. A user selected topics for which they’d like to received stories. Over time, Zite’s algorithms personalize the stories to the users liking based on what was being read, shared, and given the thumbs up or down.

Zite was popular for lawyers who did not want to learn how to aggregate their own news feeds by sources and subjects. With Zite, a lawyer could select health insurance, employee benefits, bankruptcy, a community etc and have Zite tailor news to the lawyer’s liking.

Bloggers looking for stories to right on and sources to engage found Zite pretty helpful. Those looking to share items on social media could do so from Zite.

A Flipboard spokesperson tells VentureBeat that Zite’s technology and functionality has been incorporated into Clipboard.

Now that we’ve integrated all the major parts of the technology such as the topic engine, collaborative filtering algorithms and thumbs up and down voting, Zite will soon stop being available as its own app. Zite users have a few more weeks to import their preferences into Flipboard. We hope many of them will do this.

It’s been a while since I have used Zite, or even Flipboard, for that matter. I like the tight tailoring of news feeds which Feedly delivers. With Feedly I can subscribe to particular sources (blog, publication, newspaper etc) and subjects (words and phrases from Google News). For example I saw the news of Zite closing done because I monitor the word, Zite, in Feedly.

No matter what you use as an aggregator of tailored news, Flipboard, Feedly, or even, Twitter, an aggregator is a prerequisite to effective blogging and social media use.

Image courtesy of Flickr by Douglas Scortegagna

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