The New York Times is developing a social news service in collaboration with Betaworks, the technology company that created bit.ly and TweetDeck, paidContent.org reported today.

The personalised service, called News.me, will be initially launched only for iPad and it is expected to be available later this year. According to Betaworks' chief executive officer John Borthwick, the company has been developing the app for six months, The New York Times revealed.

"We're abstracting from that a vision of how social sharing and the real-time Web are going to influence the news consumption experience," vice president of research and development at The Times Company Michael Zimbalist said. However, besides the honeycomb logo available on the website, no further details on how the service is going to work were revealed.

Earlier this year, The New York Times invested, along with AOL and Lerer Media Ventures, in Betaworks. The newspaper also sold to the technology company the prototype that it had developed for News.me, paidContent explained.

This is not the first time that media companies have launched personalised news services. Last year, the Los Angeles Times, owned by the Tribune Co., presented Newsmacth, a section that creates a personalised page of content based on users' behaviours and tastes, Mashable.com reminded.