I haven’t seen it for myself yet, apparently not being one of the chosen 5,000 beta testers, but the New York Times aggregator/personalized news page called MyTimes is live.
Reviews, analysis, and gripes are up at TechCrunch and PaidContent, including screenshots for the curious.
It looks like a flawed but good effort from what I can see. The best part, or at least the most pleasant bit of functionality might be the sharing of your list of feeds with other users. Of course, their angle is more like “Read what our journalists read,” but the potential should be there to have a list of “friends” and be able to see their list of sources and easily add them to your own page, sort of Netflix-ish. Does Rojo do this? I think it might, but I don’t have any personal friends who use it, so it’s not something I’ve pursued.
What I know I like about this is that it’s a newspaper rolling their own RSS and social networking play, without hooking themselves to a MySpace or a NewsGator (Ed. Note: both of which I use with great frequency and abandon).
If more newspapers can make more of their own plays in the send-the-users-away-so-they-come-back-for-more department, they’ll be one step closer to becoming a destination for information rather than just one source of many.
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