NY Times will launch a public beta site soon
Posted by Savita Sauvin on June 18, 2010 at 3:24 PM
The New York Times plans to set up a public beta site on which it can experiment and test its ideas and applications before they go live on the newspaper's website, AdAge.com reported. The beta initiative will begin in July or August, and will be called "Beta620," wherein 620 refers to the paper's street address on Eighth Avenue in New York.The new platform will be an examination ground for The Times to study and understand the impact of its features on readers and advertisers before they are implemented, thereby facilitating more user involvement with its products, while eliminating the clutter of new products on its main site, according to a blog posted on MediaBistro.com.
"Our hope is that we will be able to bring new ideas from concept to prototype to launch much faster with a public beta site than we could using NYTimes.com alone - and that we may do so without the risk of disrupting NYTimes.com or conflicting with other development projects," Marc Frons, chief technology officer for digital operations at The Times, stated in a memo to the staff, AdAge.com reported.
The news site has been adding many new features lately to enhance its user experience, including the recent introduction of pop-up boxes at the bottom right hand corner of the story page showcasing links to related articles, the Times Skimmer feature that allows visitors to choose page layouts, and the Times People feature facilitating easy sharing of news articles.
Not every idea is successful, such the Times Extra function introduced by the news site in December 2008 that allowed readers to switch on to the home page automatically with populated links to stories from other sources and blogs. It did not manage to captivate readers' interests and hence, was discontinued after a year, owing to failure of the idea to become a one-stop shop for news by aggregating other outlets' reports, according to AdAge.com.
The news site had 32.5 million unique visitors in May, according to ComScore.
The news site has been adding many new features lately to enhance its user experience, including the recent introduction of pop-up boxes at the bottom right hand corner of the story page showcasing links to related articles, the Times Skimmer feature that allows visitors to choose page layouts, and the Times People feature facilitating easy sharing of news articles.
Not every idea is successful, such the Times Extra function introduced by the news site in December 2008 that allowed readers to switch on to the home page automatically with populated links to stories from other sources and blogs. It did not manage to captivate readers' interests and hence, was discontinued after a year, owing to failure of the idea to become a one-stop shop for news by aggregating other outlets' reports, according to AdAge.com.
The news site had 32.5 million unique visitors in May, according to ComScore.
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![Digg](http://digg.com/submit?phase=2&&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.sfnblog.com%2Fmobile%2F2010%2F06%2Fny_times_plans_to_boost_user_interaction_1.php&bodytext=<form mt:asset-id="7120" class="mt-enclosure mt-enclosure-image" style="display: inline;" contenteditable="false"><a href="http://www.sfnblog.com/the_new_york_times.jpg"><img alt="the_new_york_times.jpg" src="http://www.sfnblog.com/assets_c/2010/06/the_new_york_times-thumb-350x89-7120.jpg" class="mt-image-left" style="margin: 0pt 20px 20px 0pt; float: left;" height="89" width="350" /></a></form>The New York Times plans to set up a public beta site on which it can experiment and test its ideas and applications before they go live on the newspaper's website, <a href="http://adage.com/mediaworks/article?article_id=144452">AdAge.com</a> reported. The beta initiative will begin in July or August, and will be called "Beta620," wherein 620 refers to the paper's street address on Eighth Avenue in New York.<br /><br />The new platform will be an examination ground for The Times to study and understand the impact of its features on readers and advertisers before they are implemented, thereby facilitating more user involvement with its products, while eliminating the clutter of new products on its main site, according to a <a href="http://www.mediabistro.com/fishbowlny/newspapers/new_york_times_to_launch_beta_site_to_test_new_features_164768.asp">blog posted on MediaBistro.com</a>. <div><br /></div>&title=NY Times will launch a public beta site soon){kind=link}
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