The Inner Workings Of A Coders Brain
Pulse iPad App Gets Steve Jobs’s Praise in Morning…Then Booted From App Store Hours Later After NYT Complains About It
A screenshot of the sleek interfaced used by Pulse
OK, there are some things that Apple do which are just stupid. There are many other things that they do which I can never really understand. This is an example of one of those things.
Yesterday morning, the pair of Stanford University graduate students who made the hot news-reading iPad app, Pulse News Reader, were ecstatic to be mentioned first–for being among the most promising developers for the new tablet device–by Apple CEO Steve Jobs in his keynote speech at the Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco.
But by the afternoon, that flush of entrepreneurial success had turned sour, after Apple (AAPL) informed the two that Pulse was being pulled from the App Store after it received a written notice from the New York Times Company (NYT) declaring that “The New York Times Company believes your application named ‘Pulse News Reader’ infringes The New York Times Company’s rights.”
In an unusual coincidence, the Times Web site was on prominent display on a huge screenshot of the iPad during Jobs’s speech.
Ironically, the Times wrote a big wet kiss about Pulse last week in a blog post titled “The iPad Pulse Reader Scales the Charts,” by tech writer Brad Stone.
“Pulse is a stylish and easy-to-use news aggregator,” wrote Stone. “News organizations still puzzling over their iPad strategies can perhaps derive some hope from Pulse’s success–or at least its price tag.”
Im thinking here that the NYT doesn’t understand trully what an RSS feed is, especially as if you were to visit the newspaper website itself, you would be presented with the same content. Needless to say after this, the developers will pull the publicly available NY Times feed and re-release the app without it. The only loser here is the NY Times, who now lose thousands and thousands of daily website visits, advert placements, and many regular readers. It wouldn’t be surprising if they go after other popular apps who utilize the same system.
While Apple have to comply with the requests of the times, its still a bit stupid on their part to do this after it has just been catapulted to the limelight by the very guy who owns Apple. Hopefully, this will all be rectified soon 🙂
According to http://www.pcworld.com/article/198394/new_york_times_to_ipad_app_developers_hands_off_our_rss.html?tk=hp_blg the app is back on the store. I liked this part in the comments:
“”We think it has been reinstated by error, and we have asked Apple for an explanation,” Robert Christie, a spokesman for the Times Company told The New York Times’ technology columnist Brad Stone .
All Things D is reporting that Pulse was reinstated because Alphonso Labs submitted a new version of Pulse that did not come preloaded with content from the Times or the Globe. It’s not clear, however, whether that change will be enough to satisfy the Times Company’s lawyers.”
If they are not using their feed, then why would it not satisfy their lawyers? hehe
/me watches the popularity of the New York Times sink lower and lower each time they keep dragging this….
Yes, this is more the fault of the newspaper than Apple, I know they have to comply, but they could at least question its removal. The fact that anyone with any application capable of RSS feeds can get the same stuff, makes this a ludicrous request.
It still blows my mind that they did this to themselves mere hours after Steve Jobs personally reccomended the app, which in turn would mean more hits to the newspaper website, and increase their turnover etc. They didn’t just shoot themself in the foot, they blew off the whole leg 🙂
If they are so paranoid about their content, then they should take their RSS feed and make it private, to ensure no-one steals their crap. I shall keep an eye on this in the future for other apps that they want to try and pull.
In this particular case, I don’t see where Apple had much choice – as opposed to a lot of the other boneheaded app rejections they’ve made.
It seems to me like the issue is that they include the URI for the NYT RSS feed built in and turned on when the product ships. That still doesn’t make it a good or smart move on the part of the NYT.
On the other hand, it’s just another case of “Big Media doesn’t get the New Deal.”
News at 11.