New York Times Goes Live With TimesPeople

Back in June I wrote about the New York Times launching their TimesPeople service in beta. The purpose is to add a social layer across their website and let users track what their friends are reading on the New York Times website. As I wrote the first time around, the one lacking feature is that the only news you are aware of using the feature, is articles that are already on the New York Times website.

One interesting thing that came with today’s news is that Venturebeat, GigaOm and Read/Write/Web will all have syndication deals with the New York Times. This emphasizes how blogs are playing an increasing role in traditional media. It sounds like the New York Times will continue rolling out new features to the TimesPeople feature depending on the popularity of it.

The company continues to be at the forefront of emerging online media strategy. I’m slightly critical of this new feature since it only works within the New York Times but at least this is one step forward. It will be interesting to see what type of response they get from their users.