One more digression: Takes All Types is the best Facebook app I've ever seen. It takes our social networks and uses them as the basis for a national blood donation network. Sign up, let them know your blood type, and they'll notify you when blood is needed in your area. Such a simple idea, but so powerful.

Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Labels: blood, facebook, Takes All Types

The New York Times web site has gotten much better in the past year, but that hasn't stopped their stock price from sinking like they have rocks in their pockets. And the sale of the Wall Street Journal shows that family ownership is no bulwark against predatory forces.

To survive in recognizable form the Times needs to accelerate their transition from a newspaper company to an information company. They need to find a sustainable business model before someone buys them and either remakes the company in their own image, or bleeds it dry.

One important step they should take: become a social network.

Social networks benefit from an organizing principle. MySpace sprang from the natural aggregators of bands and music, Facebook from academic communities. News as an organizing principle is potentially larger and stickier than either of those, and has the potential to foster a more engaged, less inane community, a social network for adults. In the real world the Times already facilitates social networking: people talk about what's in the news, and they especially talk about what's in the Times.

There has been an enormous amount of me-too bandwagoneering around social networks, but in the case of the Times this move makes strategic sense, and can be accomplished gracefully and incrementally. First, allow users to create public profiles, tied to their comments and other site activities. Allow comments on news stories as well as blog posts. Let readers vote up good comments, à la Amazon (and USA Today). Let readers create and join interest groups, and talk to each other.

In practice the Times would be a confederacy of networks. The people talking about books on Paper Cuts and about parenting on Judith Warner's blog would not be the same polemicists attacking each other on the op-ed pages. This is a good thing. With the depth of content on the Times, there's something for everyone.

Two things they should not change: the requirement that commenters register, and editorial oversight of comments. The air of gravitas that hangs over the Times is a feature, not a bug, and high standards are and should remain a positive differentiator.

How does journalism fit into this? As it always has: professional journalism should remain the heart of the Times endeavor. But creating an ecology of engaged readers around the professional content could significantly extend the Times reach, raise traffic levels, and create the possibility for significant new revenue streams. A social networking strategy works hand in hand with the Times historic mission of democratizing information, and it would dovetail nicely with recent experiments like My Times.

Other changes that should accompany this shift:

• Nix mandatory registration. The slight benefit it offers (to advertisers; it doesn't benefit readers at all) is far outweighed by the downsides. Create an engaging network and people will register on their own.
  
  
• Get people who have led successful Internet companies on the board and in senior management. See my previous post on Marc Andreessen's piece (which is what got me thinking about all this in the first place).
  
  
• Enter the local news arena. Partner with the likes of Outside.in, EveryBlock, or my employer, Curbed.com. The web excels at local and neighborhood information, and there are ad dollars to be had. Again this would work nicely with My Times.
  
  
• Seriously improve search. Partner with Google.

Right now NYTimes.com traffic is dwarfed by MySpace and Facebook. The Times has national and international reach, fantastic content, and an incredible brand. It can and should be one of the most popular sites on the web, rather than the 201st, which is where Alexa ranks it today.

There is a way out of the morass of the past year, and social networking, with the benefits it would bring to both readers and the company, is one step towards it.

Labels: facebook, MySpace, New York Times, nextNY, social media, social networks, Wall Street Journal

Fred Wilson has a post on his family's media consumption in which he talks about his kids' attitudes towards movies, TV (watched as often as not on DVD), the web, video games, radio, magazines, newspapers, and books.

For the most part it's what I'd guess kids would be doing: watching video, playing games, spending time on Facebook. There are a few happy surprises, though. Magazines are holding their own. Hard to say how typical this is--I don't have any insight into the health of the magazine industry--but it surprised me. I had assumed magazines were in the same world of hurt as newspapers.

Most notable, though, is that reading books is apparently alive and well at the Wilson's: "They still read books the way we did as kids. That doesn’t seem to have changed a bit. They read them for school, they read them for entertainment, and they read them lying in bed waiting to be tired enough to turn off the lights."

I found that absolutely uplifting, and anecdotal confirmation of something I've previously blogged: there is no replacement for long-form narrative text. Eventually that text may be displayed on an improved Kindle, as soon as someone (Apple or Amazon, most likely) gets it right. The exact delivery method doesn't concern me much. But that kids still take pleasure in reading books? That concerns me greatly, and it's great to hear of books holding their own in a home full of other glittering distractions.

Labels: A VC, books, facebook, Fred Wilson, kindle, magazines, newspapers, video

Wordie now has a Facebook-style mini-feed of your recent activity, like adding words or lists, making comments, moving words, and adding tags. If you go to a profile, you'll see a link to this in the upper-right, available as either a web page or a feed.

By default this is turned on and visible to everyone. You can turn yours off by clicking the 'edit personal preferences' link on your profile. Activity is tracked (if you keep it turned on) from tonight forward; previous activity won't be available.

This is a first step towards enabling some sort of watchlist feature, so you can more easily keep track of what friends and people whose words you like are up to--think Flickr contacts. Since it's available as a feed, I'm hoping people will find their own good uses for it, as they've done with other Wordie feeds.

While I was mucking about on the server I also upgraded a bunch of other stuff (for the curious, I moved the whole shooting match to Rails 2.0), and probably broke something, or many things. As always, please let me know if I did, or if you have suggestions.

Labels: facebook, features, feeds, mini-feeds

I just added Facebook as an "also on" service, so you can connect your Facebook profile to your Wordie profile. I registered for Facebook a while ago and ignored it until it exploded recently, but I quickly got addicted once I realized that practically everyone I've met in the last five years is on there. I was late to this party, but it's amazing to see that it actually sort of lives up to the hype. Unlike, say, MySpace, which I loathe, or LinkedIn, the suburban corporate office park of social networks. Or even Twitter, which is rad, but even more pointless than Wordie. Which is part of the appeal of both, I suppose.

It brings up a question, though. I plan on building a Wordie Facebook app in the coming weeks. I could just port over the existing blog widgets, and may, as a sort of warmup. But an app that takes better advantage of the platform might be more fun. I have some ideas percolating, but would love to hear suggestions. I'm thinking of something that would tie into both the friend connections on Facebook, and the word connections on Wordie, and that was simple and fun to boot, is the direction we should look in. If anyone has any brilliant ideas, please post them in the comments.

Labels: facebook, features, social networks