Last night, Pulse News Reader got a nice update. It brought along some nice social features, which is probably to compete with the new Material app that just hit beta today. Pulse has over 20 million readers right now, and tons of publishers. Android Headlines is a Pulse Publisher as well, so make sure you add us to your Android News section on Pulse. Unlike Flipboard and Zite, Pulse uses a more traditional model of presenting you unfiltered feeds. In it’s latest update, Pulse added “Pulse Highlights,” which is a new feature that puts the focus on the stories that your friends have shared on the service and on Facebook. Although I wish they added different social networks, like Twitter, and Google+.
Currently this is only available on their Android app, so I guess it’s an Android exclusive? Although it is in the iOS app, but the update is in the approval process so it’ll be available sometime soon unless Apple thinks it competes against their product. Now inside the app, users will see what stories their Facebook friends have shared. In addition to this, a new “highlights” section is now in the app which will of course highlight the stories your friends have shared.
I downloaded the update to Pulse last night before heading to bed, so I haven’t had much time to play around with it. But the new Highlights feature seems to be pretty cool. That is if your Facebook friends are actually using Pulse. For me, I have about 700-800 friends on Facebook and only 3 of them use Pulse. So it won’t be of much use to me. Lately, Pulse has been becoming a pretty good news reader app, and even better with the highlights feature. It also uses less data than competitors like Google Currents (which also lags and causes battery life problems in Android 4.2) and Flipboard.
Have you tried out the new version of Pulse yet? Have you added Android Headlines to your feeds? Let us know in the comments below.