The New York Times has completed a major integration with Facebook directly into the publication’s extremely popular homepage. The functionality appears to be similar to Facebook’s recommended articles social plugin, with users being required to opt-in to the service. The most notable aspect of this new service however is that the typically design-conscious company, has a plugin which doesn’t align with the rest of the site. I’d expect them to resolve this issue eventually though.
According to NYTimes.com, the only information that will be displayed within your Facebook profiles is recommendations that you chose to share on Facebook. In contrast to other services, like those who’ve integrated with Facebook’s Instant Personalization product, all information being used by NYTimes.com is explicitly stated. The company hope to avoid receiving any criticism for privacy related issues.
This new service also does not integrate with the New York Times’ existing TimesPeople social news network. Instead, the company has chosen to use a number of separated social tools for providing more interaction among its users. If you want to see how the new integration works, simply visit the New York Times homepage. You can also learn more about the company’s various social features via the company’s social media tools FAQ.
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how are there no comments on this? this seems like a huge validation for Facebook (not that they needed) while also signaling a major shift for the New York Times.
I have some stake in this on a few fronts, the first being 'social' but also as the founder of http://www.mostmost.net I spend a great deal of time thinking about the question of how to best engage the audience from news.
My suspicion is that the New York Times will continue to play around with social and I wouldn't be surprised if we saw a little birdie on the top right as well not too far down the line.
Comment by David Gadarian — August 31, 2010 @ 9:07 pm
I couldn't agree more David about being surprised that there hasn't been more buzz about this. The social-ization of news content has been debated as threat or opportunity for media brands for a long time, from the 'Epic 2014' thought experiment to CNN's president arguing that #FB is a bigger threat to his business than Fox.
It does seem like a pretty simple implementation so far, as befits an experiment – but I suppose that's before the paywall goes up and the economics of the recommendation engine they've just installed goes out the window.
The company I work with, http://betapond.com, were betting to see how much more FB Connect users NYT would need before getting into deeper layers of socialising individual content on the site and also extending the recommendations back to the user in other channels.
Comment by Richard Delevan — August 31, 2010 @ 9:41 pm
Interesting indeed.
One observation: This excerpt from the NY Times social media FAQ page (http://timespeople.nytimes.com/packages/html/timespeople/faq/social/) suggests that TimesPeople will ultimately disappear:
"If you signed up for TimesPeople before August 2010, you will still be able to recommend items to your TimesPeople network by clicking the button on the TimesPeople toolbar. If you did not have a TimesPeople account as of August 2010, the toolbar will not appear. Please use Facebook or Twitter to recommend or share content."
Comment by Rich Gordon — September 1, 2010 @ 9:52 am
test
Comment by Chiwah LIU — September 2, 2010 @ 2:03 am
yes
Comment by Tran Johan — September 2, 2010 @ 2:07 am