The New York Times has opened its My Times customized home page to the public. (via Techcrunch) Anyone who has used My Yahoo!, Pageflakes, Netvibes or iGoogle will find the look and feel very familiar. The default modules include Journalist’s Picks, stories from the NYT Home Page, NYT most emailed articles, Yahoo! News, BBC News, Bookmarks, Weather, Movie Showtimes, Flickr and Stock Quotes. You can add and delete modules, including content from the Times, outside sources and any RSS feed. (The Times seems to be using its own RSS feeds under the hood.)
It’s the best execution of The Daily Me that I’ve seen from a news company. But it’s at least two years too late. Aside from serious Times junkies, I don’t see many people using this page. The Times, like many news sites, gets most of its traffic horizontally. Of all the people who visit nytimes.com in a month, only 18% (1.4 million) visit the home page. By contrast, My Yahoo! gets 22.3 million unique visitors and iGoogle gets 6.8 million.
The most interesting part of My Times is that you can pick from modules selected by Times journalists. Want to know what David Pogue is reading? You can click to see that he recommends Engadget, AppleInsider, Slashdot, Gizmodo and his own stuff. (Unfortunately, I can’t link to this page.) These pages are good resources that would be even more useful if they provided direct links to the RSS feeds so that you could subscribe with your preferred personal home page or news reader.
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Rakesh Agrawal's blog 