Kara Swisher at All Things Digital says the app’s developers planned to contact Apple and take steps to remove NYT content. "It is not immediately clear why they need to, since Pulse draws from publicly available Times RSS feeds as many other apps do and does no scraping," she writes, adding that Pulse is little more than an RSS reader.

The whole thing has led to speculation that the New York Times may be "declaring war on News Aggregators." That may be the case, at least with aggregators that require payment from users. Swisher references the notice from the NYT’s lawyer, saying, "The Pulse News Reader app, makes commercial use of the NYTimes.com and Boston.com RSS feeds, in violation of their Terms of Use*. Thus, the use of our content is unlicensed. The app also frames the NYTimes.com and Boston.com websites in violation of their respective Terms of Use."

Matthew Ingram, writing for GigOm, elaborates on that framing part: "What may have contributed to the complaint is that Pulse also has a view that shows the newspaper’s website inside a Pulse frame. Although there is no obvious advertising in the app, such framing of a site’s content has led to legal challenges against news aggregators in the past, including a high-profile case launched in 1997 by the Washington Post, CNN, Reuters and a number of other media entities against a site called TotalNews, which embedded news content from other outlets inside a frame."

Clearly not all of the NYT’s staff felt threatened by Pulse, as Brad Stone writing for the publication’s Bits blog last week said, "News organizations still puzzling over their iPad strategies can perhaps derive some hope from Pulse’s success."

It will be interesting to see, A: will the New York Times continue a crusade against aggregators (even if only paid ones)? B: Will the Pulse News Reader app be back in the App store after getting rid of the New York Times feeds? C: Will other publications follow the Times’ lead?

Under any of these options, it appears readers will lose.

To migrate RSS subscriptions, FeedDemon/NetNewsWire users will need to: 

1. Download the latest version of FeedDemon/NetNewsWire

2. Sign up for a Google Reader account

3. Associate the Google Reader account with the FeedDemon/NetNewsWire product (A step-by-step wizard is provided within the new version of FeedDemon/NetNewsWire

There are different instructions for other NewsGator products here. NewsGator says on the company blog:

Users of FeedDemon, NetNewsWire for Mac, and NetNewsWire for the iPhone will have 30 days to download new versions of these applications that can synchronize with Google Reader. Syncing will give you a consistent reading experience across your PC, Mac, iPhone, and web browser. For example, if you add a new RSS feed, organize your folders, or mark some stories as read on one device, the changes will immediately reflect across the others.  Users of NewsGator Go! can select from the mobile RSS reader options that synchronize with Google Reader.
 
The bottom line for you: we keep improving our client applications, and now you can sync with and use the web based RSS reader you’ve been asking for.  We’ve been working with the Google team to make these changes as smooth as possible, and they are thrilled to welcome all NewsGator users to the Reader family.

New versions of FeedDemon and NetNewsWire are currently available, and a new version of NetNewsWire for the iPhone will be available soon. Check out the FAQ page for more information about changes to NewsGator’s RSS reader products.

 Hitwise’s Stats On Google Reader, Bloglines
(Photo Credit: Hitwise)

Heather Hopkins piles on the statistics, writing, "A year ago, Bloglines attracted twice the share of US Internet visits compared with Google Reader.  The gap has closed to 40% in the week to 17th May 2008.  Last week, Bloglines ranked 21st among Blogs and Personal Websites and Google Reader ranked 32nd.  A year ago, those sites ranked 45th and 118th.  Share of US Internet visits to Bloglines have increased 158% in the past year and visits to Google Reader are up 267%."

This information has to be a little disappointing to Ask, which owns Bloglines.  While Google Reader has received relatively little attention from its corporate owner, Bloglines benefited from a major update just two months ago.  Also, even if the Bloglines Team was a bit sluggish in responding to an outage, Google Reader’s crew seems more likely to ignore criticism.

In any event, Hopkins found that the two sites seem to be serving different audiences.  "Google Reader sent 61% more visits to News and Media websites than Bloglines," she reports.  Bloglines instead sent more visits to the "Photography" and "Shopping and Classifieds" categories.

It should be interesting to see how this slow-motion race continues.

Bloglines has rolled out a slew of new features today, including:

1. Save: Allows you to save posts including text and graphics (if made available by the publisher) to the Saved folder, so you have quick access for reference later.
2. Photo Widget: Provides large thumbnails of images from your Flickr feeds. Previously, only the text description was available, so viewing Flickr feeds is better and faster.
3. Blog View: A new option with the 3-Pane View that lets you see the full blog site versus just the feed article. You’ll see not only the article, but also other site features like Comments and left and right rail page elements, including ads.

Another nice option is ability to either “Save” or “Pin” an item in Bloglines.

What’s the difference?

Sometimes you want article “Pinned” in your reading flow so you’re forced to look at it again to really absorb the complexity of the post. Other times, you want to file away those posts that stand the test of time. That might sound very nuanced, but remember if you’re reading 1,000 articles a day, like Blogliners, you develop several different reading modes.

That could come in very hand–especially if you’re a procrastinating blogger.

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