Disclosure: VentureBeat is one of Zite’s publishing partners, which permits us to place house ads within the VB publisher section of Zite free of charge.

Zite was one of the first companies to answer cries from loyal Google Reader users when the service was shuttered back in March, building a “replacement” in six hours. Yet in the news reader’s latest iOS app update, Zite’s management team makes one thing very clear: It’s time to let Google Reader die.

At its core, the CNN-owned Zite is sort of the anti-Google Reader, anyway. Google Reader pulls in RSS feeds from any news website as they become available, which creates an unruly fire hose of content that most people couldn’t possibly keep up with, and the design is bland and basic. Zite, on the other hand, curates news from the best publications on the web using your preferences and arranges them in a visually pleasing digital magazine layout.

“We realized we didn’t need to shift focus of the company for the next two months trying to build a Google Reader replacement, because we already did that in 2011 with Zite,” Zite CEO and founder Mark Johnson said in an interview with VentureBeat. “I think part of the reason Google Reader’s death was so prominently covered was because a large group of Google Reader users were people in the media. A very small portion of people — reporters, analysts, VCs and news junkies — are actually benefiting from seeing every single one of those articles in one place.”

I tend to agree with Johnson’s assessment, as I had a front row seat when my boss, Dylan Tweney, and colleague Sean Ludwig communicated their frustrations over Google Reader going away. I imagined them pulling their hair out trying to find a replacement. [Not counting Canadians, all the men on VentureBeat's editorial staff have -- or have the ability to grow -- full heads of hair, but Google Reader's death almost changed that -- Ed.]  But those that just want a good mix of articles from trusted sources that can reasonably be finished without having to block out half a day on the calendar, Zite already did a pretty good job of delivering. The latest update, however, makes some important tweaks to the user experience that will help ease those former Google Reader fans into Zite’s news curation service.

With Zite, you can “thumb” up or down articles, but now you’ll be able to see a prominent list of sources that you’ve “thumbed up” in the topic drawer (aka category or section) — sort of like a list of favorites. You’ll also be able to click through to any of those sources to read and vote on everything they’ve published recently. All the content you’ve read will now appear gray to signify what you’ve seen previously — a nod to Google Reader’s bold/gray headlines. And finally, Johnson said, Zite wants to fix the problem Google Reader had with burying really good content from sources that published something only once or twice a week (or month) by giving it a higher placement within Zite’s magazine layout. That means the algorithm for news curation is changing slightly to unearth what would be the best content from a Google Reader account with hundreds of headlines collected from lots of handpicked sources/publications.

“The goal is to give Zite more of a magazine feel that’s inviting, not a huge list of headlines and photos,” Johnson told me. Zite is also rolling out more diverse “story cards” that help break up what’s shown on the screen. For instance, some topic drawers will have only headlines and photos from sources, while others may feature a headline and a good pull quote from an article, which I’m guessing is similar to how Flipboard presents content. In other words, unlike Google Reader, there isn’t a flawed display that’s exactly the same for every story, since a one-size fits all approach really doesn’t work when dealing with content from more than a handful of publications.

Johnson said Zite’s strategy focuses on streamlining the news curation and consumption experience for new Zite users. He nicknamed this process “frog cooking,” a term I was previously unfamiliar with.

“It’s said that if you slowly raise the temperature of the water inside a pot with a frog inside, you’ll be able to cook [the frog] without it noticing,” he said.

I didn’t ask, but I’m quite positive no frogs were harmed during the development of Zite iOS version 2.3. And while Johnson was likening the “frog cooking” to new users unfamiliar with Zite (and walking them through the process with tutorials as shown in the screenshots below), I’d characterize most of the new tweaks in the iOS update to “Google Reader-er cooking.”

In addition to various UI and algorithm tweaks, Zite is also bringing on a slew of new publishing partners, including Atlantic Media (The Atlantic and Quartz), Business Insider, Fast Company, GigaOM, Salon, SAY Media (Remodelista and ReadWrite), and Serious Eats. Zite users can add any of these publications a separate section within the Zite app, as VentureBeat previously reported. And while the latest updates are only available on iOS devices, Johnson said the team is planning to launch a new version of its Android application later this year.

Zite’s iOS app update should be available for free later today via the iTunes App Store. Check out the gallery of screenshots below for a closer look at the latest version of the app.

Google Glass will likely be immensely useful for doctors, field workers, and other service providers. But for ordinary people, it’s disorienting and nerdy. 

But that hasn’t stopped developers from responding to Google’s request to build applications for Glass. Owners of the device now have a nifty news aggregation app dubbed “Thirst Droplet,” released today by Thirst Labs.

Thirst believes the investment in Glass was worthwhile and will help it reach “Generation C” (the “C” stands for “connected.”) Either way, it reportedly only spent around three days developing features for the app.

Thirst has already unveiled its Android and iPhone apps for personalizing and curating the news. Follow topics on a mobile device and the web, and Glass will send a push notification when it’s trending on social media. Hundreds of thousands of topics — such as “Oprah Winfrey,” “49ers,” or “Google” — are currently available for you to follow.

The Glass app takes the news experience step further, giving you the opportunity to listen to an entire article. You can also flag an article for future reading and email it to yourself straight from Glass. You can also “like” or “dislike” a story.

Thirst has differentiated itself from other news readers with its language processing tools. Rather than asking readers to discover news, the it automatically finds and presents the most relevant content in what Thirst says is an engaging way. The company tracks millions of data sources — blogs, social media, and so on — to determine whether news is trending.

Don’t miss the explanatory video below to see how the app works.

The Thirst news app for iPad

“Under the hood, you don’t read the same feeds as Google Reader. We find the topics relevant to you,” CEO Anuj Verma said in a recent interview with VentureBeat (pictured above), hitting on how Thirst differs from competing news apps like Flipboard and Pulse. “You don’t really have to hunt for the content.”

Similarly to news aggregation app Pulse, which LinkedIn recently acquired, Thirst Labs was formed by college friends. The founders are a pair of University of Berkeley, California grads who share a passion for UI, UX, and developing algorithms.

San Francisco-based Thirst Labs has raised $950,000 in seed funding from BlueRun Ventures, Steve Newcomb, and Jason Krikorian.

Top image // Google Glass

You may know Outbrain from the bottom of posts like this one, where the company recommends content to you from across the web.

While recommendation has been Outbrain’s bread-and-butter since the beginning, with its purchase of Scribit (no, not Scribd), Outbrain is expanding to new territory: Content curation.

Scribit allows brands to curate long form content from various sites and host it on their own sites. Essentially, it allows any brand to be a content creator — even if doesn’t create content itself. It also gives actual content creators another way to ensure that people read their work.

And that’s where Outbrain steps in. By nabbing a content curator, Outbrain is extending its product portfolio even further, offering brands yet another way to increase their marketing depth and giving publishers another revenue stream.

Sounds like a perfect fit, right? Gilad De Vries, Outbrain’s strategy vice president, agrees: “We sit an interesting junction between brands and publishers,which is why this makes so much sense for us. It’s a perfect match,” he said in an interview with VentureBeat.

Photo: Shutterstock

Web-clipping and bookmarking tool Clipboard is dressing up in its best new features and making a grand public debut today. The site, which has been invite-only since it launched in October, is finally open to anyone who wants to sign up. It is also introducing a new Boards feature, which lumps items into collections by tags, as well as a few other new tweaks.

Clipboard lets you bookmark, collect, organize, and share web-clippings. It’s not limited to images — it clips text, audio, animations, and fully formatted sections of webpages with links intact. You can keep your clippings private and use it as a self-organization tool, Evernote and Delicious style, or share them with a select group or the world. You can also follow other users and checkout their public clips.

A Pinterest Board (left) and a Clipboard Board (right).

Though Clipboard founder Gary Flake bristles at the comparison, his baby obviously has a lot in common with visual bookmarking juggernaut Pinterest. There’s the basic clipping concept, the image-heavy irregular-grid layout, and the buttons to like or re-share a bookmark. Even the star new feature, Boards, begs a comparison to Pinterest’s Boards, what with the exact same name and almost identical design (pictured right).

But comparisons are beside the point. Clipboard takes what Pinterest does well and expands on it, improves it, and I think infuses it with a new level of usefulness that is missing from the shallow, all-social site.

Computer scientist Flake has thought extensively about what he calls the “sharing landscape,” coming at it from the uniquely cerebral background you’d expect from a former technical fellow at Microsoft. He’s carefully considered the other major players and the different motivations of their user bases.

“What you put on Facebook is to a great extent what you want other people to think about you. What you put on Pinterest is more about your aspirations,” said Flake. “Clipboard is much more about getting stuff done. The focus of our DNA is first and foremost to be good for one user, and then be social, and then be aspirational.”

Clipboard accomplishes this by having more useful content than Pinterest. Where a Pin might show a pretty image of a cake recipe, you still have to click through to get that list of ingredients. Clipboard displays the full recipe along with any relevant in-text links. It also shifts the focus from exhibitionism to useful tool by being private-by-default with social options instead of the other way around.

“We respect users’ privacy more than anything else,” said Flake. “You own the data and you are lending it to us. It’s your stuff, not ours.”

Click to enlarge

Flake was kind enough to sketch up this awesome chart (right) showing where Clipboard falls in the ecosystem of sharing and clipping tools (we love it when founders draw diagrams for us). It is ambitious, able to collect complex data instead of just images, and works as a solo or a social sharing tool.

Currently, Clipboard is just focused on wooing new users and getting established, but Flake has something rare in Silicon Valley: a plan to monetize his product that isn’t based on selling the company. One option is to take “the intent and the context and how that’s presented and turn that into a similar alignment of interest.” That means Clipboard could one day use your data to serve you with offers, products, or ads that are right up your alley. Other possibilities Flake is considering are an enterprise product and revenue sharing.

The young company has already rolled up a couple of competitors, Amplify and Clipmarks, but faces stiff competition from the revived Delicious and Snip.it. Clipboard has received funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Betaworks, Index Ventures, CrunchFund, SV Angel, First Round Capital, and others.

Wednesday, Springpad launched the latest version of its digital notebook service, which includes a web, iOS, and Android app that help you save snippets of information from the Internet. The new version is a major overhaul of the service and includes some Pinterest-inspired design elements.

We all tend to save a lot of digital information these days; it’s one of the reasons Pinterest has become so popular. But before Pinterest’s time, Evernote and Springpad were competing to be the best digital notebook to save snapshots of webpages, notes, to-do lists, and anything else you want to remember later. Springpad has become outdated in recent years, with an almost cartoony-like interface. Evernote on the other hand, has established itself among more seriously users who love its offline support and straightforward, powerful interface.

“Our focus is to creative the best version of the digital notebook possible,” said Springpad chief executive Jeff Chow in an interview with VentureBeat.

Trying to solidify its place between Evernote and Pinterest, Springpad’s latest release takes some features from both, plus some collaborative features from Google Docs. The result is an app that looks like the offspring of all three popular services.

Completely different look

Perhaps the most striking difference between the Spring 3.0 and its older versions is how it looks. The first versions of Springpad were cute, but looked dated compared to Pinterest’s clean lines. The company appears to have taken cues from the digital pinboard for its latest look. Everything from the notebook backgrounds, to the way photos are displayed feels more grown up.

The comparison to Pinterest becomes apparent when you look at a notebook in the gallery view. Photos, if included in a note, are displayed prominently as tiles. However, unlike Pinterest, each image must be large enough to fit the space or the quality is compromised, which can make some notebooks look a bit ugly.

Improved search

Like its predecessors, Springpad 3.0 still lets you save everything you could ever want to remember, including movies, wine, books, and recipes. Unlike previous versions, the new app plays up the ability to search for something to add to a notebook.

There are two major ways to save information to Springpad: the clipper bookmarklet and the search bar. In the past, the search bar worked about 70 percent of the time, crawling the Internet for the product, book, or movie you were looking for. But it often struggled to find the right match.

It’s this exact feature that Springpad revamped in its latest version. The new “smartbar” uses semantic search to find a product or place that you can add to a notebook. The semantic search allows you to start typing a few words and Springpad will start to guess what you are looking for. In addition, you can start typing a note in the smart bar, and Springpad will give you options to set an alarm, create a note, or make a reminder.

While trying out the smartbar, I found it still struggled to find some local businesses and certain products, but it seems to be improving with time.

Smarter, collaborative notes

Springpad has also added more features to make the information you save more valuable. If you save — or “spring” as Springpad calls it — a product, the app will grab the product’s url and price. If you spring a restaurant, Foursquare, Yelp, and OpenTable information will be included in the note, as well as a map, phone number, and business hours.

This new version weighs heavily on collaboration. Underneath each note you save is a comment section and log of the changes made, similar to features found in Google Docs. This is meant to encourage shared notebooks, where multiple people can curate the content and work collaboratively. Notebooks can be kept private, restricted to invited people, or be made public.

Going along with collaboration, the new version of Springpad is aimed at people who like to curate content to share with others.

“We’ve found we are going after a new audience type, people who love to share their knowledge. We’re creating micro-communities,” said Chow.

Much like you can follow a Pinterest board, users can follow each other’s notebooks and stay updated with the latest great recipes or movies. Springpad found that people who consider themselves the best recipe finder or their family’s go-to person for book recommendations wanted a place to collect their knowledge and share it with others. The company responded and created “Explore” and “Following” tabs, where you can find other people’s public boards and follow the stuff they clip.

Current Springpad users will have their accounts updated with the new look starting early Wednesday morning. Springpad’s iOS and Android apps will also be updated to reflect the changes.

The new look and features of Springpad 3.0 are definitely an improvement over previous versions. The company has seemingly found a niche between Pinterest and Evernote, where people can find exactly what they are looking for and save it in a visually pleasing way.