Newspaper & Mailroom
NYTimes.com Launches New Online Destination to Share Beta Projects and Get Feedback from Users
Monday 16. February 2009 - NYTimes.com announced today the launch of a new category of The First Look blog dedicated to displaying projects that are in development and hosting conversations about emerging ideas between Times developers and the sites users.
This will also be a place to highlight interesting uses of The Timess APIs from around the Web.
“This is part of our ongoing strategy to transform NYTimes.com into a more vibrant and interactive news and information platform,” said Marc Frons, chief technology officer, digital operations, The New York Times Company. “We believe this is one of the best ways we can improve the quality of our Web offerings.”
The launch highlights two new projects:
Web Slices: A new feature for the pending launch of Internet Explorer 8. Web Slices are live bookmarks that automatically update when new information is added to the bookmarked site. The Times is working on three Web Slices: Latest News, Most E-mailed and TimesPeople.
Article Skimmer: An experiment in content layout where users can fit several articles into the space of their computer screen, allowing them to peruse a collection of articles at one time.
To date, The Times has launched seven APIs including a search API, campaign finance API and a movies review API. A full list can be found on The Timess developer network page at http://developer.nytimes.com.
According to Nielsen Online, NYTimes.com had 21.6 million unique visitors in the United States in January 2009, and was the No. 1 newspaper Web site in the United States, a position it has long held.