Wednesday, March 09, 2011

Zite: A Challenge To The Social Paradigm

Image representing Flipboard as depicted in Cr...Image via CrunchBaseMaybe social is like search. It is yesterday. The next wave is that of personalization. Search will stay. Social will stay. Both will stick around. In big ways. But perhaps the next wave in innovation is personalization. What if your service figures out ways to know you really, really well?

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That would make room for all sorts of services that portend to be the Pandora of this, the Pandora of that.

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Fast Company: Personalized iPad Magazine Zite Learns As You Read, Challenges Flipboard: the Genius playlist or Pandora of news discovery--but with one noticeable advantage: Zite is smarter ..... the technology behind Zite can learn your reading habits and personalize content based on your interests. ..... you might get content you want from sources you don't know. ...... As I skimmed through the news, Zite began learning my preferences. What specifically do I like about social media? Was I interested in long-form journalism? Did I enjoy straight-news items or editorials? Features or analysis? Popular sources or niche blogs? The more feedback Zite collected, the more personalized it became. ..... combination of semantic- and statistically based machine learning ..... Skip over a news brief? Zite counts that as a soft no. Did a headline catch your eye and get you to read the longer story? Zite counts that as a soft yes ....... News will soon narrow from, say, articles on food or sports to thousands of specialized sections such as news on vegetarianism or skiing ...... after playing with the app for a week, Zite began featuring "Graphic Design & Typography" as one of my top news sections ....... Zite is the first iPad news reader "to go beyond manual customization." ...... continuously refines content so it's fresher and dynamically tailored to one's interests. ...... personalization is a technology--it's something that learns from you. So, for example, your technology section and someone else's will look very different based on your behavior ..... "The underlying philosophy of our algorithm is: You are what you read," Davar says.

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