Wrestling With Times People

I am really enjoying Times People — the social news streaming experiment that the NY Times has rolled out. But the natural exclusiveness (clannishness?) of the paper leads to some serious annoyances.

A case in point: I am an active participant in Times People, and get a lot of recommendations from those I follow there (including many NY Times writers and editors, and technoids like Tim O’Reilly, Constantin Basturea, Chris Messina, and many more).

Times People recently added the feature to let users add a comment to a recommendation, which is great. However, there is still no way to recommend anything published outside of the NY Times, and no easy way to even include a link into a comment. Even worse: if I go to the trouble of writing a post about a NY Times piece, create a shortened URL to it (manually), and then paste that link into the comment, it isn’t displayed as a link, and it is not clickable.

So, someone downstream of me would have to copy the link and paste it into another browser tab to read my piece. Note that the NY Times links are all active though.