The Rise and Fall of Venture-Backed News Readers in One Chart

Re:The Rise and Fall of Venture-Backed News Readers in One C... by walterbell on Tuesday December 22, 2015 @12:06PM (#10778853)

UBC's Zite (after sufficient training) was consistently excellent at surfacing high-signal content from a variety of sources. It declined after acquisition by CNN and has become nearly invisible after incorporation into Flipboard's "Cover Stories". Now that Flipboard has turned off the backend which powered the Zite app, the next best options are:

  - manually curate Twitter lists for reading in Flipboard
  - manually curate RSS feeds

In the age of burgeoning AI and powerful clients, it is tragic that we have such little investment in automated filtering where all data is private to the endpoint and portable between devices. Or public sharing of training data for news algorithms. Where is the GPL-equivalent for data at risk of being orphaned?

We need standardized legal clauses for startup founding engineers to deter "Orphan Software Works". E.g. source code is escrowed at the time of each acquisition, and if the acquired technology disappears from the market because all acquirers have closed or abandoned the product, it must be released to the public as open-source, with or without patent grants or training data.

Code and learning from dead startups can fertilize research fields for future crops, instead of disappearing into legal black holes.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The Rise and Fall of Venture-Backed News Readers in One C... by doff on Tuesday December 22, 2015 @02:42PM (#10779852)

I didn't realize just how much I relied on Zite until it was gone. I tried to launch it several times a day in the week after it was turned off.

If anything, Flipboard has taught me that the UI of flipping pages is best left to physical magazines, where each page can have enough information density to make it worthwhile. Maybe the flipboard flip action works better on a tablet; but on a phone I can't bring myself to use it, no matter how much of Zite's technology they fold in.

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Re:The Rise and Fall of Venture-Backed News Readers in One C... by walterbell on Tuesday December 22, 2015 @03:25PM (#10780168)

Flipboard has sadly hidden the Zite per-article training options in "Up Arrow" -> "Tuning Options" which is the last menu item under the Share menu. What was one Zite click (up/downvote) is now Flipboard's click, swipe, click, click.

It brings you to a dialog which offers:

  More Like This
  Less Like This
  Mute Site
  Report Site

Gone is the Zite option to whitelist/subscribe to a site, which was the equivalent of following an RSS feed. Tragic. At least medieval cathedral builders would leave behind ruins to remind future generations of what was attempted. Software just vanishes.

Note to News App Developers: read Claude Shannon on the role of surprise in information theory. If your app shows the same articles being regurgitated in every other app, there is no surprise, i.e. news or information. Zite excelled at surprise.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The Rise and Fall of Venture-Backed News Readers in One C... by kazinator on Tuesday December 22, 2015 @03:26PM (#10780177)

Flipboard is something people actually use?

I recognize the name as some crapware pre-installed on my Samsung phone.

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Re:The Rise and Fall of Venture-Backed News Readers in One C... by walterbell on Tuesday December 22, 2015 @03:34PM (#10780223)

It's useful on tablets when combined with Twitter lists. Each list becomes a Flipboard magazine, you can then flip through meta-pages with substantive link previews, surrounded by tweets. This gives the benefit of Flipboard's UX with Twitter's manually curated content. This use case is buried:

  Profile
  Following
  Accounts
  Service Name (e.g. Twitter)
  Your Lists
  List Name

Before it was turned off, Zite allowed their users to migrate their data (topics, white/blacklist, votes) to Flipboard. For longtime Zite users, there were thousands of data points. Sadly, that data has not resulted in a Zite-like filter of Flipboard's content.

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