With a focus on personalized news, Zite uses the twitter and delicious APIs to deliver a unique news aggregating experience. 

Zite feels less like a traditional news experience (flipboard tries to recreate newspaper/magazine reading) and more like curated rundown collected by a personal assistant. 

Price: Free.
Ads: None (publishers add them soon)
Content: ★★★☆ (3/4 stars) - Twitter, Google Reader, and Delicious API, but no Facebook integration. Content partnerships took a hit after cease and desist letters from The Washington Post, AP, Gannett, Getty Images, Time, Dow Jones. (source)
Endgame: A rumored $10 million CNN buyout came to went down Aug 31, 2011.

What’s missing: A more simple way to share topics or stories with friends. A CEO the responds to student inquiries and timeliness of this post on my part. 

A screenshot of the Zite home screen:

A screenshot of the Zite section screen:
 

A screenshot of the Zite story screen:

The Zite preview video:

How many times have you typed in a question on google like “What is new and exciting in the tech world?” or “What are the best home remedies for a sore throat?” more often then we’d like to admit right? It would seem though, every time you do type one of these questions in, almost without fail, Yahoo Answers pops up with an answer to that very question, and chances are there is one maybe relatively* (I use that term very lightly) accurate answer that addresses the question at hand, more likely though is there is a slew of inappropriate remarks that have the wherewithal of a thirteen year old boy and his buddies trying to sneak the words no0b and FCUK in as often as they can. Not exactly the most reliable of sources for accurate information.

Crowd-Sourced Answering

Enter from stage left, Quora, a new social platform that allows people to pose questions, and write crowd sourced answers. Crowd-Sourced Answers whats that mean? It means that any user can pose a question, and any user can respond, but, the difference lies in that others vote up the best answers, ignore the bad ones, and can make recommendations for edits to the best answers as to make them more accurate.

Why Quora?

Beyond the crowd-sourced accuracy model that Quora adopted from Wikipedia, which helps to ensure quality, reliable, and correct answers to the questions, Quora provides individualized features that help you aggregate information on all the topics you are interested in. Quora allows you to follow topics, specific questions, and specific users (a large amount of the Quora user base are very influence members of their communities i.e. Philip Kaplan, the entrepreneurial wizard from SyracuseU) which allows users to very quickly find information they otherwise wouldn’t have been privy to. 

Quora is proving itself as a strong startup through their crowd-sourced accuracy model, their easy and intuitive subscription model and the appeal of the wealth of knowledge that the user base collectively has. If you haven’t tried Quora yet, get on over there and start asking questions, if you can’t think of any here’s a suggestion: “Why is Quora becoming to popular?” I’m sure it’s users will have something to say.