Had a look the New York Times site recently? The site has some very interesting new features.
- Highlighting text on the page will bring up an icon to search for information on that highlighted text.
- New social networking features for content sharing and recommended features on top of the header.
I am not entirely impressed with the end-to-end usability of the highlighted text feature. Instead of a nice ajax box for the search results it opens a new window, which is annoying. I’m really impressed though in the idea.
The social networking features are much different than other implementations, which I’m always excited to see. First of all, there is no password. You can mark certain articles as “recommended”, and I’m assuming will be broadcasted to all of my “friends”. The type of lingo used is very family to Twitter, as in I have people who I am “Following” and people who are following me “Followers”. RSS feeds are also built in.
I like to see that a newspaper is innovating on the web. With the decline in subscriptions, they are going to need a lot more of these neat kinds of features.
