Last month, we reported that The New York Times would be expanding its online-media reach with TimesPeople, a sharing and bookmarking feature on the site.
But that's not all for the Gray Lady's digital makeover, Silicon Alley Insider reported Wednesday. Also on the way is a set of application program interfaces (APIs) to get Times data to third-party sites, a custom widget generator that bloggers can use to embed news on their sites, and an expansion of TimesPeople so that it's on the Web site rather than in the form of a Firefox plug-in.
A look at the NYT's forthcoming widget generator.
(Credit: Silicon Alley Insider)There's also reportedly more in store for Blogrunner, a Techmeme-like start-up that the Times acquired and has worked into its technology coverage to pull in headlines from around the Web. And the Times will be developing iPhone applications for the new app store that Apple will be unveiling with the new iPhone 3G.
What wasn't revealed was a timeline, for the most part. So these remain projects in the works, and we'll likely see gradual beta launches before they're readily available.
software engineers for a video in collaboration with Beet.tv.
Note: The spelling of Derek Gottfrid has been corrected.
(Credit: Beet.tv)
The New York Times has added a new feature to its Web site that takes a few cues from Facebook and Digg: TimesPeople, now in beta.
TimesPeople users can build up friends lists and can see a "news feed" of which stories their friends are recommending, sharing, and commenting on. Times online readers have been able to comment on stories, as well as rate reviewed restaurants and movies, for some time now, but recommending is new.
The TimesPeople drop-down menu, with a news feed and people search.
(Credit: NYTimes.com)TimesPeople is currently available only as a Firefox browser plug-in, but software engineers told CNET News.com that it would eventually be more widely available and without a download required. New features will be added too, but don't expect the venerable newspaper to try to compete with Mark Zuckerberg: Engineers stressed that the Times will always be an information source, not a social network. That's why the TimesPeople application is extremely light and minimal--profiles are limited to locations and user icons, and content from the social feature is limited to a "news feed" page and a drop-down menu. However, at some point, a "Most Recommended" tab may join the popular "Most E-mailed" story list that the Times' site displays.
The TimesPeople iPhone interface.
(Credit: NYTimes.com)Outside NYTimes.com, you can subscribe to a feed of an individual's activity using RSS, or browse your friends' updates with a specialized iPhone interface; TimesPeople members can also push their updates to their Facebook profiles by syncing the two. And if you'd rather just be an observer, you can subscribe to friends' updates on NYTimes.com while leaving your own feed updates turned off.
Many print publications have been working on social-news projects, primarily by partnering with existing sites like Digg. Conde Nast's Wired Digital went ahead and acquired Reddit. Critics might say that by building a social-news technology in-house, the Times is hurting itself by not tapping into the user base of an existing site.
But here's the catch: while NYTimes.com content is free, it requires a log-in to read more than a story or two at a time. The Times, consequently, has millions of user accounts already on file.
This story was researched and reported in collaboration with Andy Plesser of Beet.tv, who produced the video.
The New York Times seems to have figured out one way to deal with news blogs: treat them as a column--sort of.
As of Wednesday, NYTimes.com became the exclusive host of Freakonomics, the social-economics blog based on the best-selling book of the same name, placing it under its Opinions section.
The blogs' authors, Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt, however, do not appear alongside esteemed New York Times columnists, but floating above the paper's daily podcast. It's an undefined space left of the Letters section that doesn't list any other specific blogs.
(Credit:
NYTimes.com)
While the placement may be strange, the move is not entirely surprising. Dubner has long contributed to The New York Times Magazine and the book Freakonomics grew from a profile piece Dubner did for the magazine on Levitt.
What is unusual is the strange hodgepodge of content that makes up what is now a NYTimes.com blog.
In addition to blog postings, Freakonomics hosts what it calls the "Freakonomics Quorum," a forum for celebrity guests to post opinions on an assigned topic. The latest one includes responses from Barbara Ehrenreich of Nickel and Dimed fame and entrepreneur turned Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, who gave a one-line answer. It hosts user-generated Q&As with famous guests. Mad Money host Jim Cramer is the most recent contributor and makes sense for a social economics blog.
Apparently, the first day was a little bumpy.
Regulars to the blog posted complaints that they no longer received their full-text RSS feeds. Levitt, meanwhile, received the most hate mail he has ever gotten, save the time he wrote about the correlation between crime and abortion statistics 10 years ago. It was in response to a post on the topic of terrorism, according to Levitt.
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