Hot on the heels of FlipBoard, the NY Times have announced that they are working on a personalized news service called News.me . The publishing powerhouse announced that they will be teaming up with BetaWorks, the company behind Bit.ly and TweetDeck , to create a more “newsy” version of FlipBoard.
Now that FlipBoard and Pulse have demonstrated the demand for personalized news the rush is on.
The project is in stealth at minute and both parties are refusing to give too much away about the product but the application is definitely going to be an iPad application at least. Been that the NY times already have the reader 2.0 which was developed using Adobe AIR, it would be safe to say that they will have a cross platform version ready soon afterwards.
This will differentiate it from other existing social magazines applications at the minute as all of them have been developed for the iPad.
Chief executive officer of Betaworks, John Borthwick told the times that the News.me product is expected to be launched later this year, initially as an application for Apple’s iPad. He said a Web version may be introduced later.
Michael Zimbalist, the Times Co. vice president of research and development, said the company had been monitoring trends on the Web and in social media but declined to provide any details about the project to the newspaper.
“We’re abstracting from that a vision of how social sharing and the real-time Web are going to influence the news consumption experience,” Zimbalist said.
“We decided to develop a prototype that we thought was illustrative of where the world was heading,” he added.
