Michal Ždanský Popular news aggregator Zite is changing hands for the second time. The service, which was launched in the spring of 2011 and bought a year later by the news station CNN, which continued to operate it independently (albeit with a greater presence of news from CNN), was bought yesterday by its biggest competitor, the aggregator Flipboard. The acquisition was announced during a conference call in which Flipboard representatives also participated, the price was not stated, but it should be in the range of sixty million dollars.
Unfortunately, this means the end is near for Zite. Flipboard does not plan to continue to operate the service independently, the employees will be assimilated into the Flipboard team and help the service continue to grow, CNN in return will get the greater presence in the app and therefore on mobile devices in general, which was previously secured by the purchase of Zite. However, the aggregator's co-founder Mark Johnson will not be joining Flipboard, instead planning to start his own new startup, as he said on his social media profile LinkedIn.
Zite was quite unique among other aggregators. It did not offer aggregation of pre-selected RSS sources, but allowed users to choose specific interests and possibly add the content of their social networks to the mix. The algorithm of the service then offered articles from different sources according to this data, thus limiting the duplication of articles and offering the reader content from unknown sources. The algorithm was adjusted during use based on thumbs up or down for specific articles.
To the chagrin of our editors, among whom the application is very popular, the service will end completely, although its creators have promised to maintain the service for at least another six months. According to Mark Johnson, the combination of the two teams should create an unprecedentedly strong unit. It is therefore possible that a similar method of aggregation, which Zite had, will also appear in Flipboard.
Too bad, Zite was much better than Flipboard for me. Such a shame :/