Todd Zeigler has some useful thoughts on the new TimesPeople feature that I talked about yesterday. I'll build on his thinking with one additonial note on the topic. What I like about TimesPeople is that it seems to embrace the perfectly reasonable idea that "social" is a how, not a what. We can engage in the news socially without having the need to take it to the level of full blown social networking. To take one example, Netflix isn't a social network by any stretch of the imagination but yet it has a great deal of social goodness mixed in. I might not form any more meaningful relationships with my Netflix friends, but who cares -- I sure get better movie recommendations than I would otherwise. That's the benefit of thinking of what we would otherwise do as something that might be made more communal in and of itself.
I'm having some fun trying out the New York Times' just-launched TimesPeople, an extremely light-weight social-networking app that rides above nytimes.com, storing the story recommendations, blog comments, and ratings for things like restaurants that I might make on the site, and showing me those of others I consent to having in my network to have in my network. TimesPeople isn't meant to be overly social -- the FAQs snarks "you won't have Times friends, and it won't get you Times dates" -- but it will replace the "Most Emailed" top ten list that generally only serves to make me depressed about what my fellow humans find most interesting.
Interesting contrast between how the Times is actively trying to engage its readers in new ways and how the AP seems eager to make sure it never gets linked to again.
I'm "nancyscola" if you want to make me one of your co-readers.
