If I Tell You To Bet On a Horse…

…you might want to have second thoughts…

I was a big fan of Rockmelt for the web and blogged about my fandom here.

It changed so much about the way that I treated the web and I felt that it had the tools and ease to make digging and understanding so much easier for me.

Then it went under.

But, it was replaced by Rockmelt for iPad.

I quickly became a big fan of that and blogged about it here.

Like the web version, it was a nice combination of web and tools for getting to stories.  It was my go-to app.

Then it got bought by Yahoo!  And it’s gone away.  I even kept reference to it in my ECOO13 presentation about social reading.  I kept hoping that it would return as Yahoo!Melt or something.  Nothing yet.

I’m also a big fan of Zite.  One of my blog posts about it appears here.

Now, the word is out that it will go away too.  Zite has been acquired by Flipboard.

Does this mean Strike three?

I do have a number of sources of news reading at my finger tips.

I was introduced to Flipboard by my friends from the Waterloo Region DSB.  It’s a nice application and let’s hope that the acquisition of Zite makes it even better.  One of the powerful things about Zite is the serendipity that it provides in news reading.  You seldom know where the next great story will come from.  Zite has learned what I like to read and I can give thumbs up and thumbs down on articles to help refine the content and lessen the time that it takes to find the good stuff every morning.

I just tell it what I’m interested in reading.  My list looks like this:  Education, Infographics, Ubuntu, Blogging, Google, Google Apps, Google Chrome, Teaching, Gadgets, Humor, Apple News, Music News, Photography, Programming, Social Media, Sports, Technology, World News, Android, Canada, e-Learning, Facebook, Microsoft, Ontario, Professional Development, SharePoint, The Next Web, VentureBreat, Windsor, Yahoo, Surveillance, Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Office 365, Coding, Gnome, iPad, and Malware.

This generally gives me enough ammunition to get up and go on a daily basis.  I hope that the logic that Zite uses somehow ends up in Flipboard.  I’m not alone – Miguel Guhlin shared this post recently.

In the meantime, you might want to keep your money in your pocket and not take #3 in the fifth race.

Related articles

• Flipboard to buy rival news app Zite from CNN
• Resistance is Futile – @Zite to Merge into @Flipboard
• Flipboard Acquires Social Magazine Zite From CNN
• Zite CEO Mark Johnson: “Honestly, The Sooner Zite Goes Away, The Better”
• Flipboard Eats Zite
• Zite newsreader sold to Flipboard