Zite
This morning before their spectacular successtrophe, I got a chance to spend a little time with Zite (http://www.zite.com), an iPad app which appears to use machine learning techniques to construct a magazine tailored to the taste of the individual user.
My own interest in such a service is well known, and goes back a few years now (http://bit.ly/fcY88J), and so I was particularly keen on kicking the tires.
In matters of content and classification, as initially trained by my twitter and google reader accounts, I was not moved to exclaim, in the parlance of our time, “what the fuck:” a superlative initial bar. Indeed I was mildly surprised that of all the default categories, the ones chosen for me included “Design and Typography,” “Programming,” and “Mac.” all of which are apt characterizations of my interests.
Articles were drawn from sources I would not generally consider following, but were always in keeping with the themes I had established with my google reader selections and twitter. This is the salient point. Tools like google reader and Flipboard focus on sources, and Zend focuses on individual content.
Zite also allows you to add categories, though I was chagrinned to find that “Mathematics” was not a category, though “Algebra,” “Geometry,” and “Algorithms” were (and these were selectable from a search for mathematics.)
As for the UI, Zite is generally attractive and readable. I can enumerate a few quirks which I found in less than a half hour of use.
Posting an article to Twitter or other services opens a popover with an embedded web pane pointing to the web form for posting, rather than a native ui using the API for the service. Depending upon the orientation of the device, these popovers could get confused as to sizing, as to be unusable.
Zite appears to reformat the content for presentation (while providing a button to view on the web). Apparently if this reformatting times out, it will default to opening the content in a web pane.
With the device in landscape mode, the rating pane is open all the time on the right hand side, forcing me to scroll the content with my left hand, which feels very unnatural. I tend to use my right thumb to page and scroll, which works across most of the apps I use.
The app needs to refine how it deals with error conditions. When their servers became overloaded from all the interest, the app went into an infinite loop, rather than letting me go back home to review content I had already downloaded to the device.
The team is likely looking at a few all nighters to get the back end services operating to scale, and then they can focus on fine tuning the app itself. I look forward to exploring content on the merits of the content itself, rather than on merely the source. I have only a handful of sources where more than half of the content is of interest, and I end up missing the occasional gem from the fringes of the Internet and mainstream sites alike.
