If like me you are ever so slightly obsessed with keeping track of news and have hordes of RSS feeds churning out articles and finding you are wasting too many hours of the day chasing news. Then the free Zite app could be the answer to keep you in touch with what really matters to you.

Zite for the iPad launched in March 2011 and garnered positive reviews, then was acquired by CNN in August and finally arrived on the iPhone in December days after another much loved app, Flipboard landed on the iPhone.

Zite keeps things relatively simple, you can provide it with your google reader, twitter and ‘read it later’ details (optional) and the app will use these to decide which topics and articles will be of interest to you. Obviously if you don’t like the suggested or want additional topics there are hundreds of topics to search through.

Each article you read offers a simple thumbs up or thumbs down for you to choose from which helps refine what future articles are presented to you so the more you use it the more relevant it becomes. Very clever!

The app supports the usual array of connections to allow you to post articles to your other social networks and updates the various news topics every hour or so. It might not be suitable for those who want a constant stream of updates but the value is with the relevance of the articles meaning you don’t sift through junk or duplicate news stories.

The app supports user accounts so you can sync up with the iPad version and while it may not be as attractive to look at like Flipboard, it is clean, simple and quick to use and after months of using the app on both iPad and iPhone it has become my number one source for the latest news that really matters to me across a huge range of topics, oh..and it’s free!

iTunes Link

Review by Guest Writer Mark Owen.