NYTimes To Customize Headlines For LinkedIn Users:
The NYTimes and LinkedIn are announcing a partnership this evening that will bring tailored headlines in the NYTimes Business and Technology sections to users based on some of their profile information. The example the NYTimes uses: LinkedIn members who work in the energy sector will see Times stories that cover the energy business. Users can also share stories with other LinkedIn users (this feature adds LinkedIn to the list of other bookmarking services like Facebook, Mixx, etc.).
Very interesting. We met with Matt Mullenweg and Toni Schneider earlier this spring, and one thing they talked about is how large publishers are moving to implement customization without logins… So this is a really interesting way to accomplish that: allow users to your news portal to customize their experience based on preferences at their preferred social networking site… I.e. help your users leverage their time investment elsewhere and re-use that investment at other sites. That’s a real win-win: it helps a user to have a better experience at multiple sites on the web based on their time investment at another site. You as a news provider maybe gain a returning visitor and they get better experiences on your web site.
So if you are Fox News, maybe your foxnews.com home page can be customized based on some preferences of your myspace… Or your CNN home page might be customized based on your Facebook prefs…
Update: Note to self – how can this tie in with the OpenID stuff that I can not get out of my brain? And just noted today as well (myspace becoming an OpenID provider)… Seems the user customization/personalization bit is right there… Tie prefs back into OpenID and allow other services to consume it. Social networks like Facebook, myspace, Linkedin etc. become OpenID providers and expose user prefs. Users can then login to NYT, foxnews.com etc. with their social network OpenID and their home page is already personalized according to their existing profile…
Another update: The above already exists… Less than a month ago MySpace released their MySpace Data Availability tools:
Developers can access any publicly available profile data from a MySpace user and integrate it into their site. This includes a user’s name, picture, bio, social graph (list of friends), and other information. Users authorize the data transfer via a one-time secure OAuth login to MySpace from the third party service. The service is then allowed to access the data.