‘My Times’ Is Here (in Beta)

PaidContent points out that the NY Times’ long awaited My Times area is finally launching in beta. (This is distinct from TimesSelect.) It’s a personalized news portal (that looks and operates very much like Google’s Personalized Homepage) for NY Times content and other news sources from around the web. It will be interesting to see if users respond to this.

Though an excellent and one might argue important move, many would-be users might already be too heavily invested in feed readers of one sort or another to start over, as it were. But there’s probably a substantial portion of the Times’ audience that doesn’t know what a feed reader is, so I could be wrong about that.

We’ll see how it does. Perhaps the most interesting thing here is the way that it creates a parallel universe of NY Times/news content. One is edited in New York and the other on your desktop. But news aggregation and functionality like My Times is the future of the online newspaper.

Here’s what the paper itself has to say:

[W]e are very excited about a personalized page called MyTimes that will let you organize your favorite Web sources of information from NYTimes.com and elsewhere and view them at a glance. Personalized pages aren’t new on the Web but ones offering the guidance of Times editors, reporters and critics are. More than two dozen Times journalists are offering their picks of sites that should engage you, whether you’re interested in baseball or climate change, politics or recipes. MyTimes is currently under development but will be opening to a wider audience later this month. You can sign up now to be among the first invited to try it.

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