The NYT And Betaworks Team Up For Stealth Social News Application

Have to tell you this upfront folks, we don’t know much. What we do know comes from this piece covering a (scarce) few details of an upcoming social news service from the New York Times and Betaworks called News.Me.

With those two names behind the product, it is going to be a big deal. We bring you the news sans real substance due to its potential market impact.

All that exists at the landing page is a bland image that will tell you about as much about the product as glaring at your kitchen floor. That said, News.Me is hardly a vanilla domain, it says volumes about the coming product; it should be a very personally focused news system that will (presumably) feature NYT content.

John Borthwick, the CEO of Betaworks said this: “We’re building something wonderful and amazing in the social news space.” The project has reportedly been under construction for 6 months. It will come out first as an iPad application (thus estranging most potential users), but might make it to a web version in the future. The product is expected to launch “later this year.”

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Betaworks is famous for helping launch Tweetdeck and Bit.ly, two wildly popular services in the current real-time and social internet-spheres.

The New York Times had this to say about the News.Me: “we’re abstracting from [a] vision of how social sharing and the real-time Web are going to influence the news consumption experience.” The newspaper participated in Betaworks’ recent funding round and sold the start of the News.Me project to the company.

That covers it mostly, two companies are teaming up to launch a social service for iPad later this year, and it should be a corker. If we can uncover more, we will update this post.