New York Times Dabbles in Social Bookmarking
The New York Times has steeped their toe in the pool of social bookmarking and I say - good for them. NYT is calling their new social application ‘Times People’ and although still in its beta stages, what you see is enough to impress.
The Times People application is posed as a Firefox add on. Once downloaded, users are able to bookmark and share articles, videos, slideshows, blog posts, comments on articles, and ratings and reviews of movies, restaurants and hotels. Navigating through the functionality is, for the most part, user-friendly and I will excuse the systems timeout during my user sesson and attribute it to some sort of ‘maintenance’ – after all, the application is still in beta mode.
The New York Times CTO, Marc Frons, describes Times People “as an example of opening up our site as a place for our engaged community of readers to convene”. I however, see it as opening leverage doors for the publishing giant: user data analytics galore and of course ad revenue opportunities.
In addition to this release of Times People, NYT has released/embraced other forms of new media: The New York Times Polling Project to something as simple as Link Journalism.
