我的应用不懂我

    Zite允许用户添加版面，所以会给你一种报纸的感觉。虽然我的品味比较笼统（比如运动、科技产品、文学、小说、营销等），但是Zite的版面也可以细分到让人难以想象的地步（包括针织、调酒、量子物理、意识流等统统都是选项）。但它也不是完美无缺的。比如它有一次推荐了一则来自俄勒岗州麦克明维尔市的地方报纸News-Register的报道，讲的是关于NCAA两支橄榄球队的故事，而我对它们一点兴趣也没有。另外在我添加的波士顿版面里，很多文章除了稍带提了一下“波士顿”几个字，完全和波士顿没有任何关系。不过它的瑕疵还是很少的，而且我用得越多，错误就越少。那天我差不多对首页推荐的四五篇文章都很感兴趣，我差不多花了一个小时的时间，在我的主版面上翻了19页，无论长文章还是短文章都看了，的确不错。

    Zite背后的主要“极客”约翰逊毕业于斯坦福大学（Stanford）哲学系，曾在SAP工作三年，然后跳槽到了微软(Microsoft's)，从事Bing搜索引擎的开发。另外，他也为Powerset和SideStep等搜索引擎创业公司工作过。后来他的脑中蹦出了完善一个推荐引擎的点子，这个创意让他欣喜若狂，而推荐引擎原本是Bing的目标。推荐引擎这种东西不可能每次都是完美的，而且你也不会希望它每次都是完美的。约翰逊表示，从开发者的角度看，“任何这类东西的问题都在于，意外发现某种东西的兴奋感是很容易创造的，我们喜欢把它归于偶然，但你真正想要的，是某种有指引性的发现，而不是完全的偶然。”我用Zite用得越多，偶然性就越小，当然这就达到了目的。但是随着偶然性的消失，发现某种全新事物的喜悦感也在消失。

    下一项是音乐。我当时还不想付费体验最近广受好评的Spotify，但是这款应用可以让你免费在平板电脑上使用它的音频设置。（这款应用是由30岁的丹尼尔•艾克的公司开发的）。一开始Spotify的用法和Pandora很像，输入一首歌曲或一个歌手的名字，Spotify就会播放类似格调的音乐。一开始我输入的是说唱歌手卡迪小子的名字，然后我又回到Zite上阅读文章。在阅读的过程中，Spotify播放了很多我已经听过、而且也很喜欢的歌曲。还有几个新歌手的歌曲我也很喜欢，但是也有不少是我不喜欢的。和Pandora一样，用户只能快进几首曲子。Spotify里当然也有广告，而且其中大部分广告都是一个叫“战前女神”的乡村乐队的幕后花絮，而我对这支乐队一点兴趣也没有。Spotify和Pandora唯一显著的区别就是，Spotify播放的大量音乐都来自我输入的那个歌手，相比之下其他歌手的歌曲则非常少。比如在我输入卡迪小子、布鲁斯•斯普林斯汀等歌手时都出现了这种情况。这并不是坏事，因为或许你很喜欢你选择的这个歌手，但是的确少了些发现的乐趣。

    当天晚上吃晚饭的时候，Ness向我们推荐了一家叫Birch and Barley的餐厅，我的朋友早就说过要到这家餐厅吃饭了，结果这家餐厅也没有让我们失望。我俩和另一个卖酒的朋友一起吃了晚饭。餐厅为我们端来了一道道的意大利面、鱼和腌肉，每次还有三种不同的啤酒。第二天早上，虽然昨晚的美食还没完全消化掉，我们又坚决地为中午的大餐做起了准备。这次Ness为我们推荐一家叫Estadio的西班牙餐厅，说我们有81%的可能会喜欢。不过，那家餐厅的菜让人很失望，我的厨师朋友也觉得非常一般，因为我们认为Ness这一次推荐失败了。

    当然，一款美食应用不可能每次都100%命中目标，一款音乐应用也难免会播放一些你不喜欢的音乐。就连Zite也是一样，虽然大多数时候都是成功的，但也不可能报道我喜欢的所有话题。它不可能取代那几家我作为忠实读者每天都要访问的新闻网站。使用Spotify的时候，即便有时候它给我推荐一首很好听的歌，而这首歌来自一支对我来说比较陌生的乐队，结果往往是我并不喜欢这个乐队，我喜欢的这首歌对于这个乐队来说也是超常发挥的作品。它的音乐品味永远赶不上我的一个音乐家朋友，也赶不上我的某个音乐评论人朋友。对Ness来说也是一样：如果我们放弃了Ness，只去我的厨师朋友推荐的餐厅，那么我们吃的每一顿饭应该都是非常美妙的。

    Zite allows you to add sections, giving it a newspaper feel, and although my own are rather generic (sports, gadgets, literature, fiction, marketing), they can get more hyper-specific than you'd ever think of wanting (knitting, mixology, quantum physics, and consciousness are all options). It is not without its flaws: The app once gave me a sports story from Oregon'sMcMinnville News-Register about two NCAA football teams I care nothing about, and in the Boston section I've added, stories frequently appear that have nothing to do with Boston apart from a mention. But its errors are rare and become more so the more I use it. When I fired it up in the apartment that day, I was genuinely interested in four of the five articles that showed up on page one. In total I spent nearly an hour swiping through the 19 pages of my main section, reading articles both short and long. Not bad.

    Johnson, the brainy geek behind Zite, is a Stanford Philosophy major who spent three years at SAP (SAP) and then worked on Microsoft's (MSFT) Bing. He also worked for search startups like Powerset and SideStep. Johnson is enraptured with the idea of perfecting a recommendation engine, which, after all, is what Bing is supposed to be. Such a thing, really, could never be perfect every time, nor would you want it to be: From a developer standpoint, he says, "the problem with any of this stuff is that serendipity is pretty easy to create -- it's what we like to refer to as randomness -- and really what you want is some kind of guided serendipity, not total randomness." The more I use Zite, the less I see randomness, which of course is the point, but as randomness vanishes, so does the magic of discovering something totally new to me.

    Next up: music. I wasn't about to pay for the much-hyped Spotify just yet, but the app (founded by 30-year-old Daniel Ek) will let you use its Radio setting for free on a tablet, which essentially works just like Pandora (P). Enter a song or artist and Spotify plays you tunes it deems similar. I began by typing in Kid Cudi and returned to Zite. While paging through articles, I heard a fair amount of stuff I already knew and liked, plus some new artists I liked, but also more than a few misses. As with Pandora, you may only skip a certain number of tracks. There are ads of course, and many are, well, bad -- the majority relentlessly pitched me "behind-the-scenes" footage of Lady Antebellum, a country group I had zero interest in trying. The only obvious, stark difference from Pandora I could identify was Spotify playing me an awful lot of songs by the artist I entered, as opposed to songs by similar artists. This happened with Kid Cudi, Bruce Springsteen, and others. That's not a negative, assuming you like the artist you select, but it does mean less discovery.

    That night, for dinner, Ness gave us Birch and Barley, which my friend had on his list anyway. It didn't disappoint. We ate with a third friend, who owns a wine shop, and the chef stuffed us with course after course of pasta, fish, and cured meat, plus three different beer samples each time. But in the morning, resolute to have another big lunch despite our food hangover, Ness suggested a Spanish restaurant, Estadio, promising an 81% likeness. The food disappointed, and my chef friend was unimpressed and had to conclude the app had failed us this time.

    Of course, a dining app isn't going to be on-target 100% of the time, nor can a music app avoid playing you some songs that you dislike. Even Zite, which I found most successful at what it does, cannot cover everything for me. It won't replace the handful of news sites to which I'm loyal and visit every day. On Spotify, even when I hear a great song by a band that is new to me, it often turns out I don't like the band, and the song I loved was an anomaly. The app will never have as much cred with me as one of my musician friends or authoritative, music-critic peers. The same goes for Ness: Had we ditched it and gone only to restaurants my chef pal already knew about, there wouldn't have been a single less-than-fantastic meal.