In addition to the 2.0 release of the Times Reader, which also went live this week, the NY Times released Times Wire, another new user experience for consuming news from the NY Times.
While Times Reader focused on creating a desktop experience that had some of the richness of the print edition, this one is focused on the kind of rapid update stream of information made popular by Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, et al.
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It’s beginning to look like the summer of 2009 (or Fall of 2009, depending on how slowly these projects move forward) may be the season in which paid content on major news publishers returns to favor.
Returns to favor among publishers, that is. Will readers accept new paywalls, or simply go elsewhere? Will micropayments finally become a cost-effective option users adopt, or just a costly distraction? What about freemium models, in which base content remains free but other rewards are used to entice what amount to donations?
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(via Dion Almaer and ReadWriteWeb)
Mozilla Labs posted a screencast yesterday of a new feature as part of the Weave project, which enables OpenID at the browser level, which will have potentially significant impact on adoption and use of portable identity technology.
Weave is a Mozilla Labs project, started back in December of 2007, which (before this latest announcement) was mostly known for their Sync service, which can synchonize (and keep in sync over time) bookmarks, saved passwords, browsing history, and tabs, keeping your firefox browser experience consistent across multiple computers. It’s quite useful for those of us who have a work desktop, home desktop, and laptop, or some other combination of multiple computers regularly used.
This new effort, however, integrates OpenID into the Firefox user experience:
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While I wouldn’t go so far as Serge Jaspers and call the new Times Reader 2.0 AIR application “the future of newspapers,” I do think it’s an interesting demonstration of how different models for content consumption are possible in the assembled web. In short, Times Reader makes the bet that for at least some users, the convenience and improved user experience of a desktop application will be more important than community.
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Last week, a number of articles appeared with additional entries in the search for new media business models for existing, old media companies.
Mass High Tech, which I still read in print, featured on its front page Richard Anderson from Village Soup and Alan Baker of the Ellsworth American. (The article is online here: Two Maine newspapers test the future of newspapers’ plans). Additionally, there were a number of articles about Amazon’s new Kindle, and how e-Readers in general might represent new hope for publishers.
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