Zite Review

There is a boon of news aggregation apps in the App Store, but there is nothing quite so simple and effortless as Zite. Featured by Apple (and for good reason), Zite plus a Google Reader account may very well supply you with all the news content you'll ever need.

Google Reader is great, and it's an indispensable source for corralling all my favorite sites' news stories into one place. I check it at a computer while tied to a desk, and I use Reeder when I'm on the go or surfing on the iPad. But Google Reader is only as good as the sites that I feed it. Discovering new sites can be a chore, given the sheer insurmountable volume of them floating out on the net.

Enter Zite, a gorgeously customizable news aggregator that does all the heavy lifting for you. Upon first boot-up, you can opt to supply it with your Google Reader and Twitter credentials to give it a taste of what you're into. Then, choose from a variety of popular subjects or search for others not listed (there are literally thousands) to round out your coverage. From there, Zite gives you a constantly updating "magazine" of news and features.

You needn't worry about RSS feed URLs or feeds in general. One of the banes of RSS is that many sites do not support full text feeds; instead, you only get partial stories or story intros, forcing you to click a link to open the full website to get the rest. Zite skirts around those issues by bringing you nothing but full text stories (replete with images or videos).

You open up to several pages of top stories culled from all the various sources you "subscribe" to, and you're given brief snippets of each. Simply click them to load the full story, in-app (sans browser). Stories are always laid out perfectly, fitting snugly within Zite's formatting parameters, meaning you get a consistent feel from story to story.

Each section of the digital magazine follows a similar layout, and it's beautiful in its simplicity. The design is minimal but more than merely functional. It's certainly more elegant than your standard RSS app, and it actually feels quite like a magazine. Stories load quickly and effortlessly, as well, meaning you have little wait time except at the initial app loading, when the magazine is refreshed.

Really, we have so very little to complain about the app that it's almost absurd. It's free, it pulls from great sources (regardless of the subject), and there was no subject matter that we couldn't find already programmed in. You can further tailor the kind of content that's delivered by giving a thumbs up or down to any story, and by telling the app that you want more stories from this source, its author, or stories revolving around several automatically generated keywords that Zite provides you. This means that the app actually gets better over time.

The only disturbance we encountered was one evening when the app refused to load due to server overload. Apparently its popularity is catching up with it, so hopefully they continue to bolster their servers to handle the influx of new users. Surely enough, though, the issue resolved itself in less than an hour and we were back to our perusal of the day's news.

Is Zite good enough to make me ditch RSS altogether? No, and it doesn't need to be. It provides me with a full, secondary source of news stories that I would have otherwise never seen. It has become just as indispensable as those feeds. And in that regard, it is absolutely a must-have app for anyone who wants to stay in tune with the aspects of the world they love.