Whenever I visit the Globe, The Times, or the WSJ’s site, I usually turn to the the “most e-mailed” feature first. It rarely contains the top stories, but it almost always points me to something something “interesting“. While startups like digg and reddit have attracted most of the hype surrounding social media, I actually think the greatest impact of social news could be redefining how we experience traditional media.
In late June, the NYT pushed this concept forward with the launch of their new TimesPeople feature (PaidContent review), which allows you to recommend articles to a set of your friends. The beta version is currently available as a Firefox plug-in, and the final release is slated to be incorporated into the site later this year.
I have been playing with TimesPeople for the past week or so, and while I’m excited about the concept, I find the current beta version lacking. Two complaints:
First, it actually took a while how to figure out how to recommend articles. The plug-in adds a “Recommend” at the top of the article tools box. This approach is too subtle: since it blends in so well with the existing site, I didn’t recognize that it was connected to TimesPeople. I would add a big “recommend” button to the TimesPeople toolbar to make that association clear — the model would be like the “tag” icon that the delicous plug-in adds.
Second, as you can see from the top right, I don’t have anyone to share articles with. Currently, there is very limited support for building your network: you can search TimesPeople users and scan your Gmail contacts to see if they are TimesPeople users, but you can’t invite anyone else to join. I suspect this is by design (in order to limit usage during the beta) but the effect cripples the service.
Building a social site is like throwing a party: it takes a certain critical mass to get it off the ground. In an old interview, Caterina Fake talks about how the flickr team personally greeted each new user to help get them started with the site. Six months after flip.com shut down, it remains to be seen whether the NYT, and other big media companies, can embrace the type of scrappy tactics that have made the upstart social sites a success.
