From the Feedly blog:

We have been working on a project called Normandy which is a feedly clone of the Google Reader API – running on Google App Engine. When Google Reader shuts down, feedly will seamlessly transition to the Normandy back end. So if you are a Google Reader user and using feedly, you are covered: the transition will be seamless.

Feedly is my top contender for a Reader replacement right now: multi-platform, ready to clone my Reader feeds, and prepared to essentially take over much of Reader’s core subscribe-and-sync functionality when Google pulls the plug.

Also, I can’t help but assume that they’re calling it Normandy because there are tens of thousands of Google Reader users suddenly storming their shores.

I don’t even know what to say about this. Reader is an integral part of my workflow and I need to figure something else out. If you have any alternatives to suggest, please let me know.

This is a brilliant and elegant use of Foursquare. It’s just a web app, at least for now, so it doesn’t really fit my use case. But it looks impressive and I’m going to give it a try.

Frederic Lardinois, writing at TechCrunch:

The web app, says Pulse, is “designed for discovery” and while it’s still a very visual experience, Pulse did away with the row layout it uses in its mobile apps. Instead, your list of sources is now on the left and stories appear in a beautiful dynamic grid layout. The design is responsive, so the layout will automatically adapt itself to the size of your browser windows.

I’ve only tried it out for a few minutes, but it’s beautiful and functional, and it’ll be much easier to manage sources on the web than it is on mobile.

I cut a parenthetical in Lardinois’ headline referring to Microsoft’s part in bringing Pulse to the web. The end result certainly does look great for touchscreen devices generally, and like it fits right into the Windows 8 design aesthetic specifically.