Zite: Your Personal Web Filter

I can't keep up with my RSS feeds.  At one time, I'd get over 500 articles a day.  Even after pruning my feeds, there's still far more than I can read.  And, I might be subscribing to feeds I find interesting, but what about the stuff that I'm missing?  I want to find those gems in topics I'm interested in, from Aristotle to Zugzwang.  Wouldn't it be nice if I could subscribe to topics, instead of RSS feeds?  Wouldn't it be great if a system learned about what I'm interested in, instead of just presenting the latest or most popular?  It's all about me! 

That's why I'm so excited about today's launch of the closed-beta of Zite.com.  I've been advising Worio (parent company of Zite) for almost a year now and I've been an avid user of Zite from its earliest alpha stage.  I am addicted: Zite is my primary source of interesting articles every day.  I've tried out other recommendation systems, but the never found any that consistently deliver high quality articles.  I usually test a recommendation system with an obscure topic to test recall (usually "taxidermy") and an ambiguous topic to test precision (usually "product management").  In the case of taxidermy, other systems tend to recommend almost nothing, whereas Zite's huge index keeps me abreast of the latest in the world of stuffed animals.  In the case of product management, other systems tend to give me press releases with a quote from VP of Product Management.  Zite does an incredible job of understanding the aboutness of an article, which creates high-quality recommendations.

Not only does Zite do a great job of recommending me topics that I want, it also learns about me by what articles I like or don't like.  In other words, the more I use Zite, the better the recommendations get. I like to tell people that it's like a Pandora for the Web.

Since Zite is built on a powerful base of technology, there are some other cool features enabled.  For example, when you start off on Zite, you don't need to enter in a bunch of topics.  If you give Zite your delicious bookmarks, your twitter feed, or your browser info, it will try to figure out topics that are interesting to you.  How cool is that?

Want to try it out for yourself?  If you want an invite to Zite, just leave a comment on this post and tell me what your biggest beef is about the way you currently consume news.

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Comments

[andy hickl]

I hate reading the same story in seven different forms.

[Herb Hernandez]

Really the same pain point that you mentioned: there's just too much content and it's impossible to 1) keep up, and 2) easily filter out the stuff that's relevant to me. On the iPhone, I'm using my6sense. Would love to compare and contrast with zite.

[Sangay Rehberi]

Classification/categorization is my biggest headache at the moment with Google Reader.. Zillions of feeds!!

[Lauri Watts]

What I'd really like is to put everything I ever found interesting into the pot, and have my newsreader bubble up the stuff I really will like or find useful to the top. It sounds to me like Zite will do just that, I'd love to try it.

I regularly find interesting insightful people who post irregularly or seldom. After a month or two, when I purge my newsfeeds, I can't for the life of me remember why I subscribed, because the particular posts that interest me, have fallen out of my history. Then a month later, I follow a link and find myself resubscribing to the same blogs all over again. I swear there's a handful of people I've been through this a dozen times over.

My real peeve also boils down to "we had this a decade or more ago in gnus/emacs, why can't we have it on the web?" (http://www.urz.uni-heidelberg.de/bin/info2html?(gnus)Adaptive%20Scoring fwiw)

[Seedub]

i find that my biggest problem with a a lack of consistent filtering is focus - i'll find a single article based in a topic i choose, but then i'm off on wild tangents from that article based on links and recommednations, and i end up nowhere near where i began and having wasted hours. curious to see if choosing a topic and getting high-quality, reasonable-volume results from a filter will aid in focus on that topic, i.e. not going off on the tangents because i know there's another article to compare/contract/add to what i am currently reading.

[Mark Johnson]

@seedub and @lauri I need your e-mails in order to send you invites. Thanks for the comments, everyone!

[Tom Landini]

I'd like to go beyond subscribing to feeds and searching for topics by keyword. Feeds that turn up an interesting article once aren't necessarily going to do that consistently. And keyword searches aren't very smart. That is, the don't often connect with related terms or tweets from people who are probably have something to say about the topic. For instance, if I search for journalism, a search should also know anything by Jay Rosen, Jeff Jarvis or any of hundreds of others probably have something intelligent to say about the topic.

[jalada]

Reading the same thing 10 times or having to only subscribe to one or two sites that cover the same stories; thus missing out on interesting things that are relevant to me just to reduce the volume of news.

My Google Reader is far too busy :(

[Jmoney]

Would Love to check site out.

Thx

[Ali Davar]

Great post Mark! And thanks to your readers for their insightful comments!

These Beta invites will be part of the first set we are sending out--we are really looking forward to this early feedback really shaping what this product becomes.

Ali Davar, CEO
Zite

[Peter]

A very timely post, Mark. If it wasn't for a friend telling me about it, I never would have found it. As it is, I'm reading it two days after you posted.

So, my biggest beefs are (1) information overload from so many feeds, (2) duplicate and near-duplicate content, especially from syndicated sources, and (3) missing out on interesting items either because of #1 or because they aren't in my feeds.

I'd love to try out Zite.

[Sameer S]

Hey, Mark ... is it too late to ask for an invite? You know I would like me some of that categorizing goodness.

Sameer.

[Donmelvin]

You asked "Where's The Beef?"...Mine is pretty much the same as you mentioned, too much to read, but I'll also add one more aspect that makes it even worse. With all that is already swamping me, I know there is more out there that I'm missing but should be reading.

So there is too much, and still not enough

Good post, thanks!

[Rob]

I would greatly appreciate an invite. If this works well, it would be the holy grail of RSS feeds.

My "Beef" is that I just cannot possibly find all of the sites that have good information on them. I uncover new ones every day. A service like this would, hopefully, automatically find those good sources of technical information and add them to your aggregation feed if they matched your preferences.