NY Times ‘My Times’ Is Your Times

Cruciverbalists will still have to pay for the newest crossword puzzles, but classic editions of the famed crosswords may be found on the New York Times’ customizable start page called My Times.

A number of similar efforts to offer Web 2.0 styled start pages, with draggable content blocks and personalized content, have launched over the past couple of years. Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft offer them, along with startups like Pageflakes, Netvibes, and Goowy among others.

None have the New York Times branding behind them. One section of My Times offers a look into what journalists at the Times recommend; a number of these journalists are already well known. Clicking on someone like David Pogue brings up a list of feeds he suggests; in his example, technology and Apple are a common theme.

My Times lead developer Kevin Prichard said at the First Look blog they have “substantially improved” the technology used in building the content widgets. Improvements listed include the addition of a crosswords widget, faster search, and a sliding font resizer to adjust the size of the text.

We figured out where Prichard and company received help. The crosswords widget is a Google widget, updated weekly. Prichard’s comment about improving the widget technology also hinted at expanding the content My Times readers could access online.

That might suggest broader access to Google’s widgets, some of which attract hundreds of thousands of users, like the Google Map, YouTube, and Wikipedia search widgets.