Zite’s dead, users told to get Flipboard

By Dan Isacsson Published November 21, 2015

Zite, the digital magazine service that was acquired by Flipboard in March 2014, will finally be shut down on December 7, reports VentureBeat. Avid users of the popular app will be able to migrate their content to Flipboard, where the underlying technology for Zite has been slowly implemented since its acquisition.

Those who haven’t checked back into their Zite apps will be greeted with a notice of the pending closure upon opening the app, and an e-mail regarding this has also been sent to users. In order to get your data from Zite to Flipboard you have to authenticate yourself either via your Flipboard credentials or via Facebook, Twitter, or Google+. Then it’s a simple “Migrate to Flipboard” tap away.

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The closure doesn’t come as too much of a surprise. Both companies were open about closing Zite’s services upon its acquisition in 2014. Mike Klass, co-founder and CTO, stated at the time that, “Our goal is to get the things that are great about Zite into Flipboard before shutting it down.“ In August the first sign of this came as Flipboard started incorporating the features found in Zite.

While some Zite fans have been livid about the acquisition and don’t think that the modified Flipboard service feels as stellar as Zite, others say they’re okay with the transition. Most complaints concern the topic filtering algorithm used in Zite, which some users state still provides better results than its Flipboard counterpart. Based on users preferences and reading habits, the algorithm was designed to provide ample articles of interest for the user.

It’s been more than a year and a half since Zite was acquired, and the slow progress in moving the service’s features to Flipboard is finally coming to a close. Flipboard has purposefully integrated the major components of Zite’s technology before moving on.

While we expect avid Zite users to feel left out by this closing of services, it would be premature to say that Flipboard won’t be able to provide the same level of personalized content. Since the underlying technology will have to adapt to the new range of content that’s also available on Flipboard, though, users may find that it takes time before the service has fully caught up to their previous user experience.

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