Zite for Windows Phone - now available
We haven’t heard much about Zite (zite.com), a news service that’s owned by CNN, but we should start paying attention to it. Zite is not just a news-app but rather a service that finds stories based on your likes and interests which gets you away from the “information overload” that many of us experience today.
The app has been on iOS since late last year and is also on Android too but now the service is coming to Windows Phone and the CEO is quite excited—mostly because he uses a Lumia 710.
In fact, according to an interview on Cnet, Nokia and Microsoft both lent the Zite team “support for technical training and also provided code and design clinics to aid the app's development”—so if you ever wonder what Nokia is doing for Windows Phone users, well there you go.
Zite CEO Mark Johnson seems quite thrilled with the move to Windows Phone (he used to work at Microsoft) as he sees the OS as the next big thing in mobile. In addition, the font and layout lend itself naturally to a “reading app” something to which we agree.
There’s also that other advantage—the Windows Phone Marketplace is not that crowded meaning if you get in early, you can establish yourself and dominate:
"The marketplace is not as crowded right now, so I'm really excited to get in front of the news market because when we launch we will have the best news-reading application on Windows Phone".
Using more than 2,000 categories for articles and an algorithm that draws from Twitter and Google Reader, Zite looks to be an interesting twist on an old problem—how do we find stories that interest us that we weren’t looking for? The app works by associating with Twitter and Google Reader, you then choose which sections you would like for "your magazine". After that, the the service brings down a personalized experience with featured articles to your liking--in that sense, it's similar to Weave for Windows Phone except that you can like/dislike article to help refine the algorithm. From our limited experience with it, the service works well and does what it promises. How it translates to Metro will be the exciting part.
No word on exact release nor if this is a Nokia exclusive but we’ll reach out and see what we can find about Zite.
Update: App is hidden in the Marketplace but you can grab it now here for all Windows Phones. Thanks, everclear76, for the link
Source: Cnet
