Disqus - Latest Comments for Michael

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!

Re: 2008/06/18/nytimes-timespeople/

Michael — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 14:29:49 -0000

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...

Re: 2008/06/18/nytimes-timespeople/

Michael — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 08:57:49 -0000

@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.

Re: 2008/09/22/timespeople/

Michael — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 12:31:39 -0000

"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.

Re: First Look: TimesPeople Adds Social Layer To NYTimes.com

Michael — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 12:37:02 -0000

"Pages with TimesPeople enabled take longer to load and provide less real estate for actual news. "

Thats 'kind-of true' but not really (in my opinion at least) :)

The extra page load time is due to javascript libraries like Prototype loading. We use that across nytimes.com for auto-suggest and other dynamic features. However, after loading one page these files are cached by your browser so the load time becomes minimal.

To be fair, the toolbar only takes about 35 pixels off the top of the page and I believe it makes a minor impact on space dedicated to news. In fact, the purpose of the toolbar is to list even current headlines, comments, blogs, travel guides, slide-shows etc from those you in your feed. In my opinion its a bit of a plus rather than a minus.

The is one feature that I haven't heard in the various commentaries on this service - that the data is yours. There are links to xml and json versions of the 'your' and 'everybodys' feed at the bottom of the page with the last 75 actions. I'm eager to see if and how this gets used and embedded elsewhere.

I hope you continue to use it as it grows and develops.

Re: NYT Rolls Out 'Times Wire' To Highlight Breaking News

Michael — Tue, 12 May 2009 14:46:44 -0000

I'm planning to post to our Open Blog (open.nytimes.com) later on with about the launch but in the interests of accuracy I wanted to correct a small point sooner rather than later - I work for the Client Technologies group at the NYT and not part of the R&D Group. I'm glad you're enjoying Times Wire and I plan to keep busy with more updates.