stevemullis[dot]net

The New York Times has added a social feature to its site called TimesPeople (beta). While not a full-fledged social network, the new feature allows people to create a profile, add friends and share articles.

Its most clever ability is its interaction with social-networking behemoth Facebook. Users can connect it with an NYT Facebook application and when articles are tagged, they show up in their FB newsfeed. As the engineer in the video puts it, “this let’s people who normally wouldn’t be reading the New York Times see and read articles that they might find interesting.”

Again the NYT does it right. They created a new feature, not as an add platform or simply a revenue booster, but as a way to draw more people into the NYT Web site and get their content into the wild. Kudos.

EDIT: Oops, I kind of left this point out.

Right now the app seems to be Firefox exclusive, which may have been an intentional F.U. from the engineers to Microsoft, or it may just be because it is still in beta. Still, I thought that was an interesting choice considering IE still has a larger portion of the Web browser market share (though it is slipping more and more every day.)