Mathew's comments - Latest Comments in TimesPeople: Nice, but not enough

Re: TimesPeople: Nice, but not enough

wim permana — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 09:46:16 -0000

"Why? Because the service contains exactly what it says on the tin: TimesPeople, and only TimesPeople. In other words, it’s for people who just read the New York Times, and all they really care about is what other people who read the New York Times care about."

Dear Mr. Ingram, I think what NYT had done so far is better than anybody else. At least, they have something which utilize their own material or craftsmanship. And this is better than nothing ...

Re: TimesPeople: Nice, but not enough

mathewi — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 16:50:06 -0000

That's a fair point, Bill -- and I think it's great that they are
letting people's recommendations flow out through RSS. And I don't
think they should become another social aggregator. But I think they
need to think more about how to be two-way instead of just one way.

Re: TimesPeople: Nice, but not enough

Silly Billy — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 16:40:19 -0000

It seems to me that the Times isn't interested in becoming another social aggregator. They aren't facebook...that's not their job. I'd argue that they've nicely (via rss) set up a way for the real social aggregator's (facebook, google reader, friendfeed etc) to consume the TimesPeople data. I'd like it if more sites would output their data to be used in things like facebook. What's more interesting to see in your facebook news feed, "So-and-so recommended this New York Times article" or "So-and-so poked you." ?

Re: TimesPeople: Nice, but not enough

mathewi — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 16:39:06 -0000

Thanks for the comment, Michael -- it wasn't intended as a criticism.
I just thought it was interesting. And your description of why it was
done that way makes perfect sense.

Re: TimesPeople: Nice, but not enough

Michael — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 16:35:46 -0000

"it involves downloading an extension to use with Firefox (interestingly enough, the site doesn’t seem to care about Internet Exploder users — only going after the early adopters, apparently)"

I think this is worth clarifying - the nature of the development work meant we needed to be able to build and prototype on top of the existing site. One helpful way to do this was to utilize greasemonkey and for the actual beta release as a Firefox Plugin.

This isn't a slight on IE, Safari, Opera or any other browser. It was purely 'what gets the job done - and faster' approach. The non-beta release will be cross-browser.

Its funny - when I started at NYT we were perceived as non-Firefox friendly and only concerned with IE!