Its main USP is that you can train it to provide a feed matching your interests, by liking/disliking articles, as well as selecting (or banning) sources and topics of interest,

I find it does adapt moderately well (I get a lot of UK press articles, but it's been a long time since I saw a football story, for example). Out of the personal newsfeed attempts I've tried, it's been the best so far.

I think there's a lot of room for improvement, still, though, like, oh, not being able to search on an actual search term (instead of just limiting my search to tags which the app knows); being unable to put new sites directly into my preferred sources when I follow a link to one from a story; being unable to tag articles myself or being able to like/dislike tags within a story context (some of the tags that come up for stories are wildly inappropriate, to the point I hesitate to vote up the story in case it thinks I'm interested in the topic indicated by the tag); being unable to see feeds for different personas, or for other people or in relation to others' recommendations; being unable to open a link inside a story in the device's web browser (or a new tab); not having a web version where I can see my feed outside of the IOS device; its annoying tendency to show me the same story from multiple outlets; ... probably other stuff!

I think a truly winning personal news feed app has yet to be written, but Zite comes closest that I've found so far. Not sure how long it will last, though, since it's been acquired by Flipboard, whose own app I didn't get on well with at all. I briefly tried Trove (of CmdrTaco fame) which had some promising features but seemed to make it harder work to find stories away from the standard mainstream news space.

Maybe I'm just missing out on the coolest stuff, but it seems there's likely vast untapped potential available to be exploited by apps on these lines (if you know different, please inform!)

I was the TL for Google News many years ago, and I had to read/deal with a lot of news sources. There is a lot of poorly researched noise out there, and my advice is to avoid the noise as much as possible, especially if you are already getting the socially relevant bits via HN/Twitter.

We did some studies. Slower periodicals (e.g. Economist) provide a lot more value per unit time than the breaking news types (e.g. CNN). The "more news faster" types generally don't make you actually more informed (surveys), and generally more depressed (since they filter for attention grabbing).

This could be a multi-hour conversation, but hopefully that helps.

I also learn a lot from going on Facebook- as any news normally makes its way on the site.

  [1] http://getprismatic.com/
  [2] https://lobste.rs/

I have a bunch of feeds that hit my inbox from Yahoo! Pipes that mashes up NPR and I think Aljazeera.

Then I follow a bunch of futurists on scoop.it for transhumanist news, future science, etc.