Apparently the Pulse RSS reader is feeling a little Flipboard envy. TechCrunch reports that Alphonso Labs, Pulse’s developer, is teaming up with Posterous to allow one-click aggregation of articles into a free Posterous-created blog for each individual user.
Something about this seems terribly familiar.
Oh, wait. That’s just like what Google Reader does. (Not to mention any RSS app, such as Reeder, that integrates directly with it. And Google Reader lets you read from more feeds, too.) In fact, integration with Google Reader’s starring and sharing system is one of the things that Pulse users have been requesting, given that it is already possible to import (a handful of) your favorite sites from Google Reader for Pulse aggregation. But they seem to have chosen their own way instead.
Their determination not to be like Google Reader has been duly noted in the past—but does Pulse really need to re-invent the wheel yet again?
To be fair, they do offer one feature Google does not as yet—the most-shared items are aggregated into an aggregator aggregator (try saying that three times fast!) called Pulsememe. (Though with only ten items, Pulsememe seems a bit content-thin just now.) Still, I’m skeptical that all this was really necessary.
