Social Network at New York Times – Good Execution of a Strange Idea

Yesterday evening New York Times launched a social network of its own on the newspaper’s website - TimesPeople. The social network is intended for you to recommend articles to your friends, share reviews for shows or movies and track comments left by your friend on various articles of the online version of the newspaper.

In general, I like the execution of the social network - it performs exactly as a newspaper’s network should perform - strictly to the point of consuming news and sharing the best parts. And while there’s a bad part - that you will have to build your network at NYTimes.com from scratch - there’s also a good part as well - at least you can import contacts from your e-mail accounts (Gmail, Windows Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail are supported).

It is quite obvious that right now you won’t find many of your contacts already registered with TimesPeople since it has been live for a few hours only. But while I have managed to find two persons registered and added their activities to my own feed, for some reason the website did not offer me to invite my other contacts - an obvious functionality that is available on the majority of social networks that want to grow their user bases with the efforts of users themselves.

Basic features of the social network are exactly what you would expect on an information-focused website like NYTimes.com is:

-          recommending stories to your friends

-          viewing the content your friends recommend to you

-          tracking what your friends comment on

-          rating/reviewing movies, shows, restaurants, and hotels and sharing these reviews with other users

To start using the social network you will need to register first - via a toolbar at the top of almost all the pages on the website. After registration you are offered to import some of your contacts from email accounts and if someone is found you will immediately see the recommendations from the people you chose to follow. In your profile you will see the feed of recent activity on the content at NYTimes.com. You can also search for people to follow and they even promise to recommend you some people with similar interests - but that will probably only happen once your interests are evident with what articles you find worth a recommendation.

Actually that’s about it - there’s nothing else you are supposed to do with the social network here and I honestly can’t imagine what you could want to do beyond that. There is also a Facebook application for the social network that displays your feed from NYTimes in your Facebook profile.

In general, TimesPeople seems to be working exactly as it is supposed to work - it helps you find the best content recommended by your friends and make better decisions about what movie is worth watching and what restaurant is worth dining in, for example. But given quite a limited volume of content on the site, I can’t say it is particularly needed to get those recommendations about articles worth reading.

I believe that a much better idea would have been to build a close partnership with an existing social network (LinkedIn is the most obvious option here with Facebook also possible) so that users could easily communicate with their friends from these social networks around NYTimes.com content. What’s more, I don’t think there’s any particular sense in building a social network on the newspaper’s website when you could stick to developing applications for existing networks (Facebook and LinkedIn again) where users could easier discover content recommended by their friends and browse to New York Times website from there.

But anyway it is quite obvious that the newspaper website is trying to become a destination site where users are better engaged with content - engaged to the extent where they are offered more pages to view based on recommendations of their friends. But in general I think it is definitely not bad to see traditional media outlets realizing they need to enhance their web offerings with something “social”.