Alphonso Labs, the fledgling company behind Pulse, a nifty social news reader for iPhone, iPad and Android devices used by roughly 5 million people, aims to pose a challenge to simple bookmarking tool Instapaper (and a range of other bookmarking and ‘read it later’ apps).
The startup is today debuting both a bookmarklet and a Chrome add-on that enables users to ‘save stories to Pulse’ with a mouse click. Extensions for other browsers are ‘in the works’, I’m told.
Saving to Pulse of course means you can bookmark interesting stories you find on the Web in order to read them later on your Android or iPhone handset, or your iPad.
No other bells and whistles at this point, but it’s a clean and functional bookmarking app.
It’s also clearly pretty much what Instapaper does (quite elegantly, I might add), but more than anything it is a welcome addition to the Pulse service that will likely not affect Instapaper usage all that much – I see myself using both alongside each other, actually.
Like Safari’s new ‘Reading List’ feature, none will kill the other. As Instapaper creator Marco Arment once wrote, the market is big enough for multiple modern-day bookmarking services to thrive.
Instapaper facilitates easy reading of long text content. We discover web content throughout the day, and sometimes, we don’t have time to read long articles right when we find them. Instapaper allows you to easily save them for later, when you do have time, so you don’t just forget about them or skim through them.
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