Zite Details How Their ‘Personalization Engine’ Works to Curate Stories

Zite started out as a popular app for the iPad that curated news stories based on your social media networks and more. Eventually, it was updated with iPhone support. Created by a team of UBC researchers, the app has exploded in popularity and was recently acquired by CNN.

The Zite team has now detailed on their blog how the Zite ‘Personalization Engine’ works to curate stories for you.

In short, Zite works by:

• mining content from your social web
• modeling that content
• modeling the community that interacts with it
• modeling your interests
• matching your interests tothe content and your community, to help you discover content you’ll want to see.

Below is a graphic of how the Zite works, but if you want a more in-depth description be sure to check out their write up. It’s a pretty interesting read. I love the element of surprise Zite brings as it learns what stories you like and dislike based on the feedback you provide.