Flipboard to flip Zite shut on Dec. 7
Zite is set to reach its very last page soon.
As reported by VentureBeat (via MacRumors), the once popular personalized news reader app is scheduled to be shut down on Monday, Dec. 7.
The closure should come as no surprise to anyone who’s familiar with the significant happenings that have shaped the direction of Zite. In fact, it’s been a long time coming.
Zite was launched on iOS in March 2011 and acquired by CNN just months later, in August 2011. It stayed with the news network until Flipboard, its chief competitor in the social news aggregation space, swooped in and purchased it in March 2014.
Flipboard has been planning to discontinue Zite since the former’s acquisition of the latter. But it’s only now that a definite shutdown date has been announced — now that Zite’s key recommendation features have been integrated into Flipboard and users of Zite can be asked to migrate to Flipboard for good.
“We wanted to ensure that Zite’s key functionality was available in Flipboard before asking users to migrate,” a spokesperson for Flipboard says. “Now that we’ve integrated all the major parts of the technology such as the topic engine, collaborative filtering algorithms and thumbs up and down voting, Zite will soon stop being available as its own app. Zite users have a few more weeks to import their preferences into Flipboard. We hope many of them will do this.”
If you’re a Zite user and you want to migrate your personalization preferences into Flipboard, just open the Zite app, tap the topmost item on the feed, and follow the instructions, which basically require the entry of your Flipboard login information.
Zite is expected to be available until its scheduled shutdown on Dec. 7. Presumably it will be removed from the App Store on or before that date.
Recently optimized for iPad Pro, Flipboard is available as a free download from the App Store for iOS, where it remains a top news aggregation app even as it now competes with Apple’s very own News app.