Hands-On With Zite: Flipboard Killer?

Zite, billed as a “personalized iPad magazine,” launched yesterday in the App Store. Using software developed by researchers at the University of British Columbia’s Laboratory for Computational Intelligence, Zite tracks your reading habits to deliver content based on your interest.

After we downloaded the free app, Zite gave us the option to sign into our Google Reader or Twitter account. When a user is signed into either account, Zite scans the feeds to create a magazine tailored to the user’s interests. After signing into Google Reader, we saw our personalized magazine appear within 30 seconds.

The main page of the magazine features a variety of headlines along the left side and sections (in our case, Arts & Culture, Fashion, Graphic Design & Typography, etc.) along the right. Scrolling right takes you to additional pages which display Top Stories. We were happy to note that Zite pulled headlines from a wide variety of sources—not just the blogs we already follow on Google Reader. Clicking on a story opens up a new window on top of the main screen.

Right off the bat, Zite did an impressive job of detecting our favorite topics, but there’s also a Customize option at the bottom of the home screen which lets you select and deselect additional subjects. Tapping on the thumbs-up or thumbs-down icon at the top of the screen lets Zite know which stories you prefer, and the app uses this feedback to deliver more relevant content. In our hands-on time, the app delivered increasingly relevant features and topics.

Zites’s biggest competitor is Flipboard, the ultra-popular free iPad magazine app which shows stories shared via Facebook, Twitter, and pre-selected blogs. Zite is more focused on delivering you the content that most closely matches your interests, not necessarily pulling exclusively from blogs you already follow.

Unlike Flipboard’s magazine-style interface, Zite reads like a newspaper; whereas Flipboard’s homepage consists of icons for each topic, Zite’s homepage displays a mix of your favorite topics. On the other hand, Zite doesn’t let you search for a specific source like Flipboard does; we couldn’t pull up laptopmag.com, for example. One other downside: A notification often popped up, explaining that, due to overwhelming popularity,  some content was not able to load. Zite says it’s working to increase its server power to accommodate the high volume of users.

Perhaps recognizing Zite’s instant appeal, Flipboard just released an update which adds support for sharing photos via Instagram and the ability to search for content from blogs in addition to social networks.  It will be interesting to see how these two iPad magazines fare over time.

Overall, Zite is definitely worth a download—especially if you want to discover new blogs covering a specific topic.