Todd Zeigler has some useful thoughts on the new TimesPeople feature that I talked about yesterday. I'll build on his thinking with one additonial note on the topic. What I like about TimesPeople is that it seems to embrace the perfectly reasonable idea that "social" is a how, not a what. We can engage in the news socially without having the need to take it to the level of full blown social networking. To take one example, Netflix isn't a social network by any stretch of the imagination but yet it has a great deal of social goodness mixed in. I might not form any more meaningful relationships with my Netflix friends, but who cares -- I sure get better movie recommendations than I would otherwise. That's the benefit of thinking of what we would otherwise do as something that might be made more communal in and of itself.
