The arrival of Apple’s News app, question marks over the future of Flipboard, and Facebook’s news publishing moves
are putting a renewed focus on how we as consumers read news online and
how that will be developing in the future. Now one of the earlier
movers in the world of news aggregation is making its own updates to try
to answer that question.
Pulse, the news reading app founded back in 2010 and acquired by LinkedIn in 2013, is today releasing a major overhaul of its iOS and Android apps — the first major updates since getting bought, in fact.
The
app will now feature a cleaner UI that borrows a swipe-left to
reject/swipe-right to save gesture borrowed from popular apps like
Tinder, but perhaps more importantly it will provide a whole new
approach to how it helps you discover news.
Rather than simply relying on getting you to find and
follow the news feeds that you read already and then delivering them to
you in an RSS-style feed, Pulse now “reads” you: based on your LinkedIn
connections, what you are reading and commenting on in LinkedIn; and
where you work, Pulse now provides you with a selection of news based on
your LinkedIn “professional graph,” as the company likes to describe
its mix of resume details, network connections and content that you
choose to read on its platform.
“We came to a conclusion just being a
reader and organising that is not enough,” Akshay Kothari, Pulse’s
co-founder who has led the development of the new apps, told me in an
interview about some of the motivations behind the update. “We felt that
our device processing speeds are getting better, and simply optimizing
the aggregation and reading” is hard to remain compelling.
The news fed into Pulse 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.
You can still add specific publications into the mix
alongside this, and for those who are using the current Pulse app, you
can continue to do so until the end of this year.
Kothari tells me that rebuilding the app in this way had always been in the startup’s sights. “We
knew 30 million people were using the app, but we didn’t know their
backgrounds or who they were connected to” to use that information to
serve more relevant news, he said in an interview. “This was why LinkedIn was a perfect fit. No other network has a deep identity data like LinkedIn does.”
All the same, 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 says the company has yet to
come to a decision on how these will appear in Pulse, which for now is
totally ad-free. “There is a team focused on building
the ad experirence, so if at any point we wanted to integrate them, we
could,” he says. “But right now the aim is to deliver a useful Pulse
experience.” He adds that there is “no strict timeline” on when they
will come — leading me to think that ultimately, they will appear.
Pulse has never officially updated its user numbers since
the LinkedIn sale. Asked for current figures, a spokesperson says it’s
just been “growing steadily” since it was bought. But some of the
struggles that other apps like Prismatic and Flipboard have had growing
audiences for their news aggregation services points to one of the big
challenges in the space: we may all read news, but we are not
necessarily news nerds.
The new Pulse tries to get around that by doing more of
the work for you. From sign-on, users are presented with that mix of
articles based on their profiles, doing away with the need for lengthy
“onboarding.” In that regard, this is not unlike the new app out of
Japan, SmartNews, which also tries to take away as much user-selection
as possible in its initial encounters.
For reference, the older Pulse app had more of an emphasis
on you selecting what you wanted to read in the app, before you could
use it, and then organised it by categories for you:
This new feed of news, meanwhile, will be a mix that could
include news about your own company, but could just as easily include
news about a company that is competitive to yours. It will feature not
only stories highlighting your network of contacts, but stories people
in that network may have flagged themselves. All fine and well, as long
as you and your network contacts are active LinkedIn users who keep your
profiles reasonably up to date.
Another notable aspect of this, Kothari points out, is
that now 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
you could in theory choose to ignore. This could annoy some readers who
are not interested in LinkedIn published posts, since you can’t remove
them from the feed. One way perhaps of minimizing their appearance would
be to “swipe left” on them to reject.
While the new Pulse feels like a far cry from a place
where you used to be able to read a mix of leisurely and work-oriented
content, its differentiation from other news apps like Apple’s and
Flipboard’s could help it stand out better and position itself as more
useful.
Still, ultimately, what people really want in their feeds
may not be always obvious from their LinkedIn profiles. That will be a
question that might also be relevant for those who will be working on
maintaining Pulse going forward.
Kothari notes that LinkedIn has a large “relevance team”
that wrote the algorithms for how news associates with your specific
social graph, but there will also be “human editors” based out of New
York helping to select and hone how content feeds develop — an approach
that Apple will apparently also be taking with its News app. For
LinkedIn, Kothari says a “human touch” will manifest in the form of
editors’ picks and headlines of the day.