LinkedIn confirmed yesterday evening that it purchased the news reading app, Pulse, for $90 million. LinkedIn now joins the ranks of CNN and Yahoo! in purchasing news reading apps. CNN acquired the Zite news reader app, which looks like a hybrid between Flipboard and Pinterest. Yahoo! purchased the mobile news aggregator, Summly, in March of this year. Like the other newsreader acquisitions, it’s not clear how exactly Pulse will be integrated with LinkedIn.
It’s interesting to speculate what LinkedIn will do with Pulse as it evolves beyond a professional social network. While LinkedIn already has its own news feed for industry stories, it’s not as consumer oriented nor as flexible as Pulse. With the death of Google Reader, other news aggregators and news feed apps have taken off. LinkedIn is no doubt riding this resurgence in popularity for news reader.
In the mean time, LinkedIn has reassured Pulse users that the service will stay the same. Of course, this could change in the future.
Source: LinkedIn
