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Twitter Acquires Social Summary Tool Summify

Liz Gannes in Social on January 19 at 9:33 am PT

Twitter has acquired Summify, a small start-up that smartly aggregates links shared by users’ friends on social networks.

Apple iPad News Reader Zite Sold to CNN for Just Over $20 Million

Kara Swisher in Media on August 30, 2011 at 10:06 am PT

Zite, the magazine-style reading app for the Apple iPad, has been sold to news giant CNN for $20 million to $25 million.

When Media Giants Attack! Cease-and-Desist Letter to News Reader Zite Claims All Kinds of Copyright Damage

Kara Swisher in News on March 30, 2011 at 3:24 pm PT

A panoply of big media giants sent a cease-and-desist letter today to Zite, the Apple iPad news reader app. The Washington Post, AP, Gannett, Getty, Time, Dow Jones and many other media organizations were part of the copyright violations action, which you can read all about after the jump.

Google Gets a Like Button: Users Can Recommend Search Results With +1

Liz Gannes in Social on March 30, 2011 at 10:46 am PT

Google today will start rolling out a social search feature it is calling +1. The product is much more limited than sharing tools from other services like Facebook, Twitter and Delicious, but since it will influence Google search results, it’s significant.

A Digital “Magazine” With One Subscriber

Katherine Boehret in The Digital Solution on March 8, 2011 at 9:05 pm PT

A new iPad app called Zite makes the news-gathering process a lot easier. The app crawls over half a million Web domains to find specific reading material that would be of interest to users, according to their social network and online reading behavior.

Zite Launches (Even More) Personalized iPad Magazine App

Liz Gannes in Social on March 8, 2011 at 9:00 pm PT

As demonstrated by all the fuss around apps like Flipboard and Pulse, people like the idea of of a touchable digital magazine. And today another one is launching, called Zite, which boasts a carefully honed personalized article-picking algorithm.

Early Adopter: Connect Your Personal Data Pipes Together With Ifttt’s Digital Duct Tape

Drake Martinet, Associate Editor, All Things Digital in News on February 11, 2011 at 9:00 am PT

APIs make the personal Web go round, but for years now, dealing with them has been the domain of the programmer. Now, San Francisco start-up ifttt is hoping to use super-simple design to allow ordinary users to bend pieces of the Web to their own will and create connections between previously siloed services. No coding required.

Flipboard Caves to User Demand; Adds RSS Feeds (And Flickr and Web Previews)

Liz Gannes in Social on December 15, 2010 at 9:01 pm PT

Flipboard, the social content display application for the iPad, is releasing an update tonight that adds users’ No. 1 most-requested feature: RSS feeds.

Almost Famous Update: Now-Out-of-Beta Brizzly Hires Facebooker and Translates Tweets

Voices, Intern, All Things Digital in News on November 20, 2009 at 8:00 am PT

Brizzly, the Web-based Twitter client from Thing Labs, covered in Almost Famous two weeks ago, begins public beta today. In addition to opening its “expanded” Twitter interface to the world at large, the start-up is offering an on-the-fly translation tool for foreign tweets. And it has hired former FriendFeeder and current Facebooker Ben Darnell.