Personalization doesn’t mean you don’t have serendipity

On Thursday, the free app is adding the popular save-for-later reading service Read It Later, as one of its so-called “Cold Start” options — joining Twitter and Google Reader as the starting point for personalizing a magazine for you (you give Zite access to these services so it can mine your interests).

Users are also getting the ability to save articles to Evernote and Read It Later, as well as the ability to share them on LinkedIn. Those options complement the current crop of sharing options which include e-mail, Twitter, Delicious, Instapaper, and Facebook.

Those features are coming not just because users are asking for them, but because users share a lot of what they read on Zite.

“Twenty percent of users do some sort of sharing in a session,” Johnson said, with e-mail still being the killer sharing app, despite all the ink Facebook gets.