Pulse has released a new update of its iOS and Android apps. Pulse is a news reading app founded in 2010 and acquired by LinkedIn in 2013. According to the TechCrunch.com, the new features of the app has a cleaner UI that has a swipe-left to reject/swipe-right to save gesture which is similar to popular apps like Tinder.
Also, Pulse is now based on its users LinkedIn connections, what they are reading and commenting on in LinkedIn and where they work. Pulse now provides user with a selection of news based on their LinkedIn 'professional graph,' as the company likes to describe its mix of resume details, network connections and content that user choose to read on its platform. Akshay Kothari, Pulse's co-founder, who has led the development of the new apps was quoted as saying that they came to a conclusion that just being a reader and organizing that was not enough. They felt that their device processing speeds were getting better and simply optimizing the aggregation and reading was hard to remain compelling.
The Pulse's news fed comes from some 250,000 sources, and will include not just a selection of news and magazine sources but content from LinkedIn's own publishing effort. Users can still add specific publications into the mix alongside this and for those who are using the current Pulse app can continue to do so until the end of this year.
The changes are very much in line with how LinkedIn has been trying to develop its wider platform. Taking the service beyond a place where people simply go to look for new job recruitment, it wants people to spend more time on the platform to help LinkedIn grow other parts of its business around advertising and premium content and area that will be developed, for example, by way of its recent Lynda.com online learning acquisition.
On the subject of ads, Kothari said that the company has yet to come to a decision on how ads will appear in Pulse, which for now is totally ad-free. He also said that there is a team focused on building the ad experience, so if at any point they wanted to integrate them, they could.
This new feed of news will be a mix that could include news about their own company, but could just as easily include news about a company that is competitive to theirs. It will feature not only stories highlighting their network of contacts, but stories people in that network may have flagged themselves.
Pulse will be automatically incorporating LinkedIn published posts into the longer feed of news. This is progression on a time when those posts were incorporated as a separate category that users could in theory choose to ignore. This could annoy some readers who are not interested in LinkedIn published posts, since they cannot remove them from the feed.
