Flipboard acquires Zite & teams up with CNN
Flipboard, the service that delivers news and social updates directly to your mobile device, has made two announcements that should vastly improve the service for its users.
First off, it announced that CNN will now be available on Flipboard, so users can get all of its latest news, 24/7, from around the world. The second announcement is closely tied to the first one as Flipboard has acquired Zite, the intelligent magazine, from its new friends at CNN.
“We acquired Zite from CNN to address something we’ve heard from a lot of you: although you can already read thousands of sources from over 20 regions on Flipboard, you want easier and better ways to discover content about the things that matter to you. Adding Zite’s expertise in personalization and recommendations to Flipboard’s product experience and powerful curator community will create an unparalleled personal magazine for our millions of readers,” Flipboard CEO Mike McCue wrote in a blog post.
It’s not clear exactly what’s going to happen to Zite, but for now, people can still enjoy using the service. For Flipboard users, they will soon be able to experience a more personalized magazine with the integration of Zite to the service.
So what can Flipboard users expect with the integration of Zite?Well, the idea is that it should enable them to deliver better personalized recommendations to users. After all, Zite is a recommendation app aside from curating news. The app allows users to vote stories up or down, which means that over time it can learn which topics you are most interested in – allowing it to deliver a more personalized news feed as time goes by. Flipboard is similar, but it’s recommendations are based more on the social aspect of things, such as when you share stories to your friends, or see what your friends recently read or shared.
This acquisition could put Flipboard ahead of other news aggregators as the service will be able to offer better news discovery. It should also become a much more personal experience, since users can create their own magazine based on their interests, and it’s social as personally created magazines can be shared with friends.
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