First a confession: I was late to the tablet game. With several laptops at home and a job that requires a lot of mobile working, there just wasn’t much of a use case for a tablet. Time passed, a friend of mine at Carbon Computing got me a great deal on an iPad, and now I’m part of the tablet world.

While I haven’t spent much time pimping my iPad, one of the first apps add was Zite because there had been so much buzz about it, particularly after the Vancouver-based startup was acquired by CNN for a reported $25-million.

This may sound dramatic but Zite has dramatically changed how I consume content. As someone who sucks in a lot of content every day for market intelligence and information, and ideas for columns and blog posts, any way that improves efficiency and productivity is a wonderful thing.

With Zite, I can create categories that are interesting or relevant to my interests and needs. Then, Zite generates stories in a magazine format that can be quickly scanned and read. It’s also easy to save an article or blog post to read for later, or share it via social media or email.

Zite also lets you “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” a story to adjust your preferences, although it would be great if you could add a particular Web site or blog into the editorial mix.

Zite has been a productivity-booster because I can cover the content landscape in 10 minutes for ideas and information. At the same time, it has cut down on the amount of time on Twitter, which I use as a quasi-RSS reader.

More important, it has dramatically changed how much content I can consume and read and, in the process, saved me a lot of time, which is one of the most important considerations.