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It has been a roller-coaster couple of days for the Pulse News Reader, and where the ride will end is still not clear. It ground to a halt on Tuesday, but the wheels began turning again later in the day, and as of Wednesday morning, Pulse was still going strong.
At the Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs highlighted Pulse, which aggregates the news from online sites of such publishers as The New York Times, during his keynote speech. By the end of the day, however, it had been pulled from the App 
Store at the request of the Times.
Jobs' comments had nothing to do with the app's disappearance, however. The wheels had apparently been set in motion for the pull-down days before, when corporate executives at the Times saw a review of the app in the paper.
The New York Times requested that Pulse be taken down, citing a violation in the terms of use of its RSS feed because it was a commercial application. Twenty-four hours later, though, the app it is back up, and it is unclear why.
Aside from the focus on Pulse by both Jobs and The New York Times, this incident can be viewed as just another routine day in the Apple ecosystem, said Rob Walch, host of Today in iPhone.
"It is small event that has gotten disproportionately magnified," he told MacNewsWorld.
In truth, app developers are constantly balancing competing forces as they try to bring applications to market -- Apple, content providers and, of course, a potential audience.
"It is not always an easy process," Walch said.
Many Masters
While Pulse's back-and-forth may be illustrative of the many interests governing the app process, it is unique in other respects. Developed by two students at the Stanford Institute of Design -- Akshay Kothari and Ankit Gupta -- Pulse quickly became one of the top-selling paid apps.
The app itself is simple: Users pick which news outlets they want to follow. The articles are then presented as text-only articles, which are pulled from the news site's RSS feed, or as full articles as they are rendered on the publication's Web site. Other features let users configure how the articles are organized, as well as social media sharing options.
Take-Down Request
The New York Times allegedly took issue with the app's layout. It combines, or frames, articles from several publications. That plus, the US$3.99 price, yielded the following letter from the Times to Apple, which was reprinted in All Things Digital:
"The Pulse News Reader app, makes commercial use of the NYTimes.com and Boston.com RSS feeds, in violation of their Terms of Use," wrote Times lawyer Richard Samson in a letter sent on June 3. "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."
That Apple took it down after Jobs' speech was probably a coincidence, Walch speculated. "Take-down notices are automatically followed when they are received to stay in compliance with the law. After that, the publisher can determine whether it is a legitimate request or not."
It is understandable why The New York Times decided to pursue this route, Greg Sterling, principal of Sterling Market Intelligence, told MacNewsWorld. "I am sure its popularity at least in part concerned the Times. They probably saw themselves being disintermediated."
Ultimately, this particular episode is a continuation of the ongoing tension between news sources and aggregators that build popular sites or apps on top of third-party content, he said.
Meanwhile, Gupta and Kothari submitted a revised Pulse app to Apple, according to All Things D. When the Pulse app reappeared in the App Store, there was some confusion as to why -- and whether it was the old version or the new one.
The Pulse iPad app was reposted because the new version does not automatically include the Times properties, according to a Wednesday morning update by All Things D.
