Zite, an iPad app that brings personalized news by using a proprietary personalization engine, has just launched an iPhone version. If you are not familiar with Zite, its creators say that it is a digital magazine that gets smarter as you use it. To learn what interests you, Zite asks for your Twitter information and uses it to look for topics that you shared, or that your contacts shared.
That’s enough for Zite to get off to a good start, but while it will continue to monitor your Twitter account, you can also help it by voting with simple yes/no votes, sharing articles or simply reading (it tracks which stories you read). What I particularly like with Zite is that it’s not just a popularity contest: Zite tries to balance personalization and discoverability. I got a demo of the iPhone app from Mark Johnson (Zite’s CEO), and the user interface is really simple and clean. Although there isn’t a whole lot of display real-estate, The main topics are easily accessible, so are the voting and sharing options.
Zite has crawled millions of pages by following what people tweet or share, and you may find news about (almost) any niche market. In fact, the core technology is so interesting that CNN has acquire Zite a few months ago. If you don’t see it on the app store yet, don’t worry, Zite is probably just waiting for Apple to approve it.