Something is stirring deep within the technology incubator Betaworks: A personalized news service called News.me that is being developed in collaboration with The New York Times.
On Thursday, a cryptic placeholder for the service went live.
“We’re building something wonderful and amazing in the social news space,” said John Borthwick, chief executive officer at Betaworks.
Mr. Borthwick’s company has helped nurture TweetDeck, a popular desktop client for Twitter, and Web tools like Bit.ly, a URL shortener, and Chartbeat, a real-time Web analytics service.
The News.me product has been in the works for the last six months and is expected to be out sometime later this year, Mr. Borthwick said. It will initially debut as an iPad application, although a Web version may be introduced at some point.
Mr. Borthwick would not say exactly how the service would work, but he hinted that its name should give some indication.
Michael Zimbalist, vice president of research and development at The Times Company, also declined to describe the application in detail, saying only that the company had been studying and monitoring trends on the Web and in social media.
“We’re abstracting from that a vision of how social sharing and the real-time Web are going to influence the news consumption experience,” he said. “We decided to develop a prototype that we thought was illustrative of where the world was heading.”
Mr. Zimbalist said that The Times Company, which participated in Betaworks’ most recent round of financing, struck an arrangement where Betaworks would buy a prototype of the app that was created by members of The Times Company’s development labs, and that same team would work with Betaworks developers to finish it.
“From the Times’s perspective, we think this is a really interesting way for a company like ours to foster an entrepreneurial culture through a start-up,” he said.
IPad applications that sort out the chaotic tumble of links and likes from the social Web have been a hot commodity lately. Flipboard, which transforms social media feeds into an attractive, easy-to-read layout, has been overwhelmed at times with the number of people eager to use its service.
SRI, the research institute that recently sold a virtual personal assistant called Siri to Apple, is busy building its own version, called Chattertrap.
The service, which is currently available in a test version, is a Web-based newsfeed that uses artificial intelligence to monitor what people are reading and learn what they like, and then serves up articles and links that suit their interests.
But Betaworks may have a leg up on the competition.
Bit.ly is a popular link-shortening service that tracks which links are shared most widely around the Web — how many times a particular link was clicked and the geographic location of the clicker.
So far this year, Bit.ly has unshortened more than 30 billion clicked links from around the Web and from thousands of content providers, who have deals with the company to get their own custom URL shorteners, giving them a unique glimpse into what articles, topics and links are popular.
It’s also worth noting that Betaworks has experimented with a service called Bitly.TV that aggregates the most popular YouTube videos people have shared using the bit.ly service. It’s not hard to imagine how a similar service could be created that ranks popular news articles.