New York Times introduces their own social network: TimesPeople

Have you ever sat down and read a newspaper with someone else?

It’s fun to go through the paper section by section, finding cool articles and pointing them out to whoever is sitting next to you. This is probably why “sharing” links is such a common function of social networks and blogs.

This morning TechMeme pointed me to the news that the New York Times has launched a beta version of TimesPeople, which they are calling a social network:

TimesPeople is a social network for Times readers. But it’s not a social network like Facebook or MySpace — you won’t have Times friends, and it won’t get you Times dates. Instead, you’ll assemble a network of Times readers. Then you’ll be able to share interesting things on NYTimes.com with others in the network. For example, when you recommend an article, comment on a blog post, or rate a movie or restaurant, these activities will become visible to other TimesPeople members in a special toolbar at the top of every NYTimes.com page.

I signed up and played around with the service a bit, and what they seem to have done is condensed the “social network” concept into two concepts which are very relevant to newspapers: an activity feed and a network of friends.

My buddy Nick O’Neill comments at the Social Times that he probably won’t be using the service much since he does most of his news digestion in a feed reader, but I’m pretty old school with news (as opposed to blogs) and I like to use the actual web site.

This is mostly because I like the discovery method of finding links around the site that take me to other interesting articles. The activity bar that now sits at the top of the page is another great addition to that discovery system.

I’m working on a post for later this week about aggregation and filtering and how people are finding, discovering, and sharing news with new social tools. The New York Times is smart to recognize that publishing content no longer means that it will be trusted, found, and read. The filter has shifted to the consumer side, and they are working to enable it.

If you want to add me to your network on TimesPeople, you should be able to find me by searching or “Jason Preston” or “Jasonp107.”

[Update: I've now also read Paul Glazowski general ridicule of TimesPeople on Mashable, and have to disagree completely. His complaint is that TimesPeople is un-intrusive and focuses primarily on sharing and recommending instead of offering robust social network features.

In other words, the New York Times did exactly the right thing by boiling down the services most useful to a news reading crowd and launching a---dare I point it out---beta service with plenty of room and time to grow. Not only that, but they've made the interface functional and subtle, so that incorporating it into your flow is easy.]