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Michael

9 months ago

in 2008/09/22/timespeople/ on Mashable - The Social Media Guide
"Naturally some people will be concerned about security and privacy matters regarding their activities on the NYTimes website."

True - but its worth clarifying the point that TimesPeople is opt-in. You have to take active measures to be able to perform recommendations and other actions. Even then, only what you choose to send is collected - there is no 'monitoring'. In addition, you can always delete individual activities from your feed or disable Sharing entirely.

1 year ago

in 2008/06/18/nytimes-timespeople/ on Mashable - The Social Media Guide
@jigajosh You're correct on many points. I too would argue that its better to tap into existing social networks rather than be another flavor-of-the-month social site.

And I think you'll find that this is the natural direction for TimesPeople to go. I'd ask you bear in mind that this is a first step.
1 reply
jigajosh No problems here, I just think sometimes it's easier to link people to add apps or add a widget then have them signup and add a bookmarklet simply to find and share news [from one site] with friends.

It might be a fun extra feature to have so why not, if the devs have nothing better to do...my point was just in regards to it being a strategy to gain traffic. I do think however it will strengthen the loyalty and make it feel like a community, and that never hurts.

Cheers,
Josh
CEO, Jigadig.com

1 year ago

in TimesPeople: Nice, but not enough on Mathew's comments
"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!
1 reply
mathewi's picture
mathewi 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.

1 year ago

in 2008/06/18/nytimes-timespeople/ on Mashable - The Social Media Guide
I would look beyond the bookmarking aspect of the service, though that might end up being a large component for many users.

To me the draw is that I can subscribe to feeds of NYT on content, surfaced by other people, that is of interest and I may miss otherwise (as opposed to subscribing to feeds because you know the person but not excited by the content).

Even within our internal dev group I found a range of content that I otherwise would have missed.

But its early days... so we'll see where it goes.

One thing I'm anxious to see is what people will do with the data (if anything) - we made a point of allowing the data to be freely available in xml and json...
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