News aggregator app Zite last night announced that it will no longer be functional past December 7, with the company encouraging fans to migrate their information and preferences over to similar app Flipboard before the deadline (via VentureBeat).
Flipboard acquired Zite in 2014 after a competitive few years together in the social media and news aggregation app sphere, keeping it open but slowly appropriating Zite's features and services into Flipboard. Zite has been hinting at its impending closure for a few months, but kept silent on whether or not it would continue to run in the face of the Flipboard acquisition until now.
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"We wanted to ensure that Zite’s key functionality was available in Flipboard before asking users to migrate. 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.”
Zite users will recieve a notification within the app, or a personalized email, of the impending closure, along with a step-by-step guide of how to migrate their data to Flipboard. All the app requires is the entry of Flipboard login information into Zite -- a Facebook, Twitter, or Google+ login will work as well -- to begin the migration process.
Similar to the newly launched Apple News, Flipboard provides customers a one-stop shop of all their prioritized daily news services. Flipboard [Direct Link] allows a bit more personalization, however, letting users construct digital magazines of favorite stories, pictures, and breaking news and share them on social media. The app was recently updated to bring full support of the larger screen on the iPad Pro, as well.
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Top Rated Comments
Anyhow, we knew this was coming when they were bought. It was just a matter of time.
I covered this a little in my general reply but you asked just about the same time I posted so I thought I would add a little more. I liked Zite a lot but its gone. Flipboard is not bad and neither is Apple News. They are different though. Generally I think Flipboard is a better service than Apple News but I have been using AN (Apple News) more since its built in to the OS and its one less extra app. I like the layout of Flipboard since they try really hard to simulate a magazine. The articles are fit into a few different repeating shapes and you flip through it like you would a magazine. AN on the other hand is based on horizontal lines on a continuous scrolling page. AN is row after row of links to stories that once open might be formatted nicely but all have a similar look on the main page.
Looks aside, AN will give you something equal to what you put into the process of finding and adding news sources, Flipboard the same. Both take time to develop and shape and remove sources you don't like. Zite felt like it did that more on my behalf. I didn't have to know or force myself to know what I wanted to read, it just gave me interesting things to read about. AN and Flipboard feel more like a service that simply looks at sources you select and feeds you everything that has been updated on those sites. Hard to explain. Zite felt like discovery of stores where AN and Flipboard feel like simple feeds. Either will be about the same, it all comes down to what style you want to view the news in. I have chosen AN simply because its built in and no worse to me than Flipboard. Not saying either is bad, just different. Hope that all makes sense.