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July 11, 2006

NYTimes launches MyTimes, a weak RSS play

Marshall Kirkpatrick

22 comments »

NYTimes.com has launched a limited beta of a personalized news site called MyTimes.com (screenshots via PaidContent), an RSS play that looks more like MyYahoo than it does the recent Newsgator partnerships with MyUSAToday and MyNewsweek. Unlike in those services, it does not appear that users can add sources from outside the recommended feeds to their MyTimes page. If that’s the case then it’s a real shame - I think that the practice of major media companies offering what are effectively branded RSS readers with editorial control over a default OPML file is better than this tame use of RSS. (Update: this may not be the case, but I still don’t care for the format of this service for the reasons below.)

PaidContent reports that MyTimes is currently limited to 5,000 users who have already expressed interest but will be opened for public use later. RSS founding father Dave Winer says he wants to do a seminar on how to design interfaces for RSS readers.

It’s hard to know for sure how this will work until it’s open for use; but when only a few of the most recent items in a limited number of feeds can be viewed then popular adoption of RSS is gained at the loss of huge functionality. I love RSS and feel really ambivalent about things like this. Yes RSS enables widgets (even MyTimes calls them that) but it can do a whole lot more. Even if the MyUSAToday and MyNewsweek sites are a little clunky and not as pretty, they are really useful for serious reading. The ability to add your own sources is key, impress me with the platform and insight of your community editors. Enabling a river of news means that readers can view items according to what’s most recent across all sources - that’s key because once you’ve selected your sources then the time that individual items appear can become more important than which source they came from. Displaying news like a field of discrete building blocks is a crude way to relate to a just-in-time world. Widgets are great for many things, but don’t tell me to view the whole world’s news through them.

Here’s more on Newsgator’s vision for RSS. Isn’t it ironic that the NYTimes is offering a more sterile RSS experience than USAToday?

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 11th, 2006 at 6:09 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Comments

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  1. Ryan

    July 11th, 2006 at 7:20 pm

    I have to admit that I am impressed with the simplicity of the interface. I thought that everything the New York Times has done is a little cluttered.

  2. Mousefinger

    July 11th, 2006 at 7:47 pm

    >>TechCrunchyFrog wrote:

    >>Isn’t it ironic that the NYTimes is offering a more sterile
    >>RSS experience than USAToday?

    Not all the too ironic, actually, since the NYTimes offers a more sterile version of the news everyday. Sterility is the devil.

  3. Naganooch

    July 11th, 2006 at 7:50 pm

    NY Times “ironically” sterile? You can’t be serious. If USA were a street vendor, the NY Times would be Jos. A. Bank.

    I do, however, like your observation on timeliness. It would be interesting if RSS helped escort online journalism back toward a focus on precision reporting in a timely manner, rather than streaming hyperbole at the bottom of a screen or fat-laden magazine pieces on things like “Night Eating Syndrome.”

  4. Kevin Burton

    July 12th, 2006 at 1:10 am

    Wow….. this is one of this situations where they should have bought not built.

  5. Mathew Ingram

    July 12th, 2006 at 5:30 am

    Marshall:

    I was just playing around with the My Times beta, and you can in fact add RSS feeds from outside sources to your page. There’s no OPML import, but you can paste the URL of a feed into a box and add it to your page fairly easily.

    Mathew

  6. Marshall Kirkpatrick

    July 12th, 2006 at 7:08 am

    Thanks Mathew.

  7. Scott Rafer

    July 12th, 2006 at 8:43 am

    The USA Today guys are reasonably progressive in our world for a publication their size. They are a big user of our system and approach the challenges very reasonably and a minimum of BS.
    http://www.mybloglog.com/buzz/members/bdure/

  8. Lee Davis

    July 12th, 2006 at 4:24 pm

    Re your last sentence: if NYT had not been providing sterile user experiences, USA Today would not even exist. So rather than irony I think it is more like evolution and the non-survival of the less fit; i.e. capitalism

  9. Maxwell

    July 12th, 2006 at 6:41 pm

    I think the “sterility” is more of a nod towards clean. It makes sense that the NYT would go this route as opposed to USA today’s look and feel.

    As with the print products, USA Today is news “lite”, with colorful graphs, laid out in a pleasing manner, but intended for very casual readers.

    NYT has longer articles, fewer pictures, and depth and article density that just don’t lend themselves easily to “news mcnuggets”

    It’s a hard thing to make palatable to an audience that isn’t used to heavy reads. I give them at least a B+ for trying to bridge the gap.

  10. Leon Benjamin

    August 20th, 2006 at 10:58 am

    It still baffles me why a) brands still don’t understand that the most powerful (dare I say it, liberating) thing they can do is put their ‘customers’ in contact with each other, and b) wise up and decentralise - the systemic changes we’re witnessing today in the online world are about diffusion and peer production, although still culturally anathema to command and control organisations.

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