Jul

11

New York Times Launches MyTimes Beta

July 11, 2006 |

my.nytimes.comNew York Times

I will review this soon. Just got my invitation email. Looks like a personalized homepage so far. Not sure what the NYTimes spin on it is yet, though. I definitely like the following from the invitation email:

My Times works best on Firefox for Windows and the Mac, and also works on Internet Explorer for Windows. (Safari support for Mac OS X will be coming soon.)

Click on thumbnail for a full-screen view of what the site looks like:

mytimes.PNG

Some first impressions:

  • blatant rip-off of Google Pages, Netvibes etc. with the NYTimes styling
  • only, they are faster, better, more flexible and more powerful
  • very, very slow to display the feeds (but lets remember it is a beta and they are probably getting slammed by the oterh 5000 people in the beta)
  • I like the selection and categorization of feeds
  • you can see the pages of journalists working at the Times (Frank Rich, David Pogue etc.) - not sure how useful this is (especially when it takes half a minute to actually see the feeds slowly, slowly load)
  • graphically, it looks as if “My Page” is always selected, even when looking at the “My Journalists” page
  • though the idea that the are “my journalists” is somewhat attractive
  • I like the different display modes (just headlines, headlines + summary, only summary for the first headline)
  • I would prefer the links to open up in a new tab or window, though - or even better, in a built-in RSS reader like in netvibes
  • of course when I go back to my page, then, it loads all the feeds again - which takes half a minute at least right now
  • searching for sources works very well and has so far found all the sources I was looking for that were not in the directory (digg.com, for example)
  • the first impression I had, though, was that it was slow - did I say that before?

    • UPDATE: looks like loading the page is a lot faster now - maybe they added a server or two

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    2 Comments so far

    1. The Last Podcast » More Reactions to My Times on July 11, 2006 9:52 pm

      […] Slowly the frist reviews of My Times are trickling in. You can find my take here. […]

    2. Stephen on November 23, 2006 8:35 pm

      Opportunity makes the thief… Stephen

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