NY Times Launches My Yahoo Clone A Decade Late
from the 1996-is-calling...-it-wants-its-idea- back dept — We were just wondering why the NY Times doesn't seem to understand the basic workings of the internet, and perhaps the answer is just that they're still a decade behind the rest of us.
Context & Ripple Effects
One day after Silicon Alley Insider flagged the launch and asked whether it was ten years too late (Cool, But Ten Years Too Late), Techdirt piles on with the same diagnosis: the Times has shipped a personalized start page that looks like My Yahoo circa the mid-1990s, arriving long after portals proved the format. It is the second consecutive day of coverage making the same point about the paper's web instincts.
The timing matters because the Times had already been pushing into automated distribution this year — an unconfirmed-at-scale but confirmed experiment posting new stories to Twitter at up to one per minute back in March 2007 — so MyTimes reads less as an isolated product and more as a newspaper still searching for its distribution model on other people's rails.
First-order effects
- NYT readers gain a customizable front page where they can assemble their own mix of Times content, shifting the paper's homepage from editor-controlled gatekeeping toward user-configured aggregation.
Second-order effects
- Yahoo and other portal incumbents face a new kind of competitor in personalization: a content owner cloning the platform rather than licensing into it, which pressures them to differentiate on services rather than headline supply.
Third-order effects
- If newspapers keep rebuilding portal features themselves rather than feeding the existing ones, the industry drifts from selling syndicated reach to owning the reader interface — with execution speed, not content exclusivity, deciding who wins, a tension the Times' own later organizational experiments would keep testing.
The trend: Legacy publishers are belatedly absorbing the portal-era lesson that controlling the personalized reader interface, not just the content, determines their leverage online.