Simon's Blog

Well I’ve used both this morning over breakfast in a very unscientific experiment and at the moment Flipboard is the winner. For those of you who don’t know flip board allows you to add content from a number of sources such as the Guardian or Mashable and Google reader. You can select one of these and it presents them in a well designed format that allows to read the articles within Flipboard. Zite on the other hand uses your google reader and twitter feeds to find news source on Google that match what you are reading in these two sources. You don’t get the actually source document but rather other sources that are covering the same subject, such as say the iPad 2.

There are a number of problems with the Zite approach at the moment. The first is performance. Things seem to have improved over the past few hours since I set Zite up – which could suggest an element of user error. This being said it still does take a while to prepare the content. The second problem is that the content is almost all North American. Whilst in some subjects this isn’t a problem, such as tech news, in others it is next to useless, sports is a case in point. These no doubt will be accessed as the system beds in but the next is a biggy. Why provide reports on topics from other providers and not the one that you have selected? This does have a certain curiosity factor, for example it was interesting to see that the conservative party in the Canadian parliament are also called the Tories but why did Zite present this to me when I certainly wouldn’t have got this from the providers I have selected either on Twitter or Google? Of course the final thing that is questionable about Zite is the way that they will pay for all this. They make no bones about using the information they are gathering on your news reading habits to target advertising at you, again this is not new as Google does just the same thing. If you are concerned about such matters then you need to avoid Zite.

So after a morning’s unsophisticated sampling what are my first impressions? Well Zite is an interesting idea that has some way to go. Given that the service has only been running for a few days then this is not such a bad thing. It does give them room to develop their product which I’m sure they will. Of course the more interesting question just know is this – how will Flipboard respond? They are the mature (?) service and so will have to produce new features/approaches to ensure that Zite doesn’t take Market share once they have sorted their teething problems out. An interesting battle to observe over the next few months.

Sent from my iPad

Well I’ve just downloaded the Zite app which is supposed to offer you customised news feeds based on your Google reader and Twitter accounts. This is seen as competition for Flipboard which provides a similar service. The USP of Zite is that it customises itself to meet you needs and so produces a unique product tailored just to your needs.

However there are two faults that I have found. The first one is that the company assumes that only American’s use the app. This is surprising as the app is written by Canadian university graduates but can be forgiven for now as this is a new service. The biggest fault however is that it is so slow or just crashes. Again this is a start up company so you should expect to have problems but, and this is a big but, when compared to Flipboard the experience is down right appalling. I have spent 15 minutes trying to set it up only to find it continually crash or to spend all it’s time ‘loading’. Not a very good start.

The idea is good but it would seem that they should spend more time working things out before the launch and also perhaps realise that there is a world outside the North American continent.

Ps – I’ve just gone back to Zite and it is still not working correctly – tilt!

Sent from my iPad