Times File

» see timesfile.nytimes.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Times File lived at timesfile.nytimes.com, behind the paper's registration wall. If you had an account, every article page carried a link that dropped the story into a personal list you could come back to. That was the whole product. No tags to argue about and no public page, just the clipping habit of a newspaper reader moved onto a web server.

The archived record of the hostname starts on 19 September 2005, which is the earliest hard evidence of the thing existing. Every capture of it is a 302 into the login page, because the list was private and the crawler never had an account, so the only surviving picture of Times File is the door.

On 18 December 2008 the paper sent an announcement email. Glenn Fleishman logged it that morning on It Died, his blog of hosted services in the process of dying, and his summary is the most detailed account anyone wrote: the feature would come off the site on 21 January 2009, the ability to store a bookmark would disappear from the stories a month earlier on 22 December, and the Times had said that social bookmarking sites could do the heavy lifting so it could put its people somewhere else.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the morgue ~

Fleishman's headline called it a move to the morgue, and then explained the joke for anyone outside the trade: the morgue is a newspaper's own name for the filing system where it keeps old information. The Times was not using that word itself. Its landing page, at the time he wrote, did not explain the removal at all.

The month-long gap between the two dates is the part worth noticing. The save link vanished on 22 December, so from then until 21 January the feature could only be read, not added to. Four weeks of a product that was already over but still showed you what you had put in it.

~ borrowed plumbing ~

Times File was not built in-house. It ran on software from LookSmart, the former directory company that had bought the social bookmarking service Furl in September 2004 and spent the following years trying to turn clipping into a business. When the Times pulled out, LookSmart offered a transfer mechanism so readers could move their saved lists somewhere else.

The engine outlived the newspaper feature by about three months. LookSmart sold Furl to Diigo in March 2009, and Furl closed on 17 April 2009 with its archives folded into the buyer. So a reader who dutifully exported out of Times File in January, into the service the Times pointed them at, got twelve more weeks before the destination closed too.

This is American newspaper plumbing of a specific vintage, and reading about it from Ankara is reading about a feature you never had the account to see. The nytimes.com registration wall of 2008 was a formality anyone could get past, but the reflex it was built for, saving a clipping from your newspaper, belonged to people who had one.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »