How the New York Times is incorporating social and algorithmic recommendations

The New York Times released Thursday a finished version of the Recommendations platform it quietly introduced in beta in late January. Available at nytimes.com/recommendations and on the “Recommended For You” tab on article pages, the tool is designed to help logged-in readers “see through the news fog,” as NYT lead technology reporter Nick Bilton put it. It serves up recommended stories based upon the kinds of articles visitors have read. “We wanted to make the site more engaging, to expose content to our readers on a more customized, personalized basis — and not customized in the way you select your topics like a My Yahoo or iGoogle, but more of a passive personalization,” Marc Frons, CTO of The New York Times, explains. “We created an algorithm that exposes users to content they may not have seen otherwise,” he adds.

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