I really liked Zite. It was one of the many apps out there that are trying to be "automatic magazines" - trying to recommend stories based on your reading preferences and present them in a visual, magazine-like format. The difference was that Zite did a really good job of recommending stories. Zite was owned by CNN - who probably had no idea what to do with it. They pretty much let it exist on its own and you would never know from the app that it was owned by CNN.

Flipboard, who acquired them, is the current big daddy in this space. They were the first to introduce the "flip" UI metaphor that Facebook's Paper app ("Faper" anyone?) seems to borrow from.

I like Flipboard's innovative UI but never quite liked their recommendation engine.

So, with Flipboard acquiring Zite, I hope to get Flipboard's UI with Zite's recommendation engine but what I am more likely to get is Zite's UI and Flipboard's recommendation engine.

Any piece of technology you like is more than likely to be acquired by a bigger company and in almost all cases, ruined. In this case though, a small company was bought by a giant company and now bought back by another small company. Could be a liberation.