Friday, April 1, 2011

"Zite" mag

I've just started reading the app "Zite" on my iMac. It's like an RSS feed reader, except it's presented much more appealingly, like a magazine.
The famous "Flipboard" has a similar concept and includes more sources, but I think that Zite has a nicer layout and better readability. It also has multiple way of influencing the weight different topics and sources are given in the app. So far I like it, and I might use it instead of traditional RSS feed readers (Reeder, NetNewsWire, Pulse, etc), because they bore me and it often takes several clicks to get a full article.

I think by the way that Zite also expands beyond the list of sites/feeds it has imported from GoogleReader, because I'm pretty sure I already have seen a couple of articles from sites I never subscribed to. This makes it be not just an RSS reader, but so far I think it's a plus, because you just can't overview all of the web, and this opens the door to serendipity to give you a hand.

This kind of thing is actually stepping smack-dap into the area which Arthur C Clarke predicted decades ago in The Fountains of Paradise, where a main character got up in the morning and opened his electronic newspaper device, which automatically downloaded articles and news about subjects he had expressed interest in. Gotta love it.

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