"New York Times" introducing News.me, a social news service

A few nanoseconds after the publisher Arthur Sulzberger said that his New York Times would one day be unfit to print, the official "paper" of record unveiled its gameplan for the future. Along with Betaworks, the Times is introducing News.me, a personalized social news service.

And they're really, really excited about it:

[News.me came from] a vision of how social sharing and the real-time Web are going to influence the news consumption service... a prototype that we thought was illustrative of where the world was heading.

That was Michael Zimbalist, VP of R&D at the NYT (whew!). John Borthwick of Betaworks, which developed TweetDeck, Bit.ly and Chartbeat, is understandably excited too:

We're building something wonderful and amazing in the social news space, and, OMG, I'm going to be so [much more] fucking rich [than I already am]!!!

Fine, that might be a slight misquote, but you get the idea. News.me is slated to debut later this year, initially on the iPad, then later on other formats that will inconvenience and eventually infuriate crossword puzzlers everywhere.