Ben Wu

It’s now out of private beta and anyone can access it at http://my.nytimes.com. All you need is a free New York Times account.

I was fortunate enough to take part in building My Times - a widget based personalization home page from New York Times. After months of hard work, It is now in beta. See some screen shots below.

My Times Main Page

Most Popular on My Times

Baby Bryden arrived on April 5, 2007 at 2:20pm. I have created a special web site for him: http://www.bryden.tv.

Paul Graham’s articles http://paulgraham.com/articles.html

Thanks to meebo, you can now IM me right from this web site.

Nice shot of a young tiger playing with his mom.

37signals’ excellent book on web-based application development, Getting Real, is now free to read online.

I have always wanted to be able to read news on my Treo 650. But almost all carriers charge an excessive monthly fee for their unlimited data plan, not to mention the slowness of accessing the Internet through the mobile phone network.

Nowadays I also mostly get my news updates by reading blogs. I use Google Reader to aggregate all my readings in a central place. It is browser based and has a nice AJAX interface so you can pretty much use it on any computer.

So wouldn’t it be nice to have a similar tool on your phone that retrieves all the blog updates for you, displays them in an easy-to-read format, and wont enrich your phone company?

I Googled and came across QuickNews. It does just that. It’s got a very user-friendly interface. And it can either use the phone’s Internet connection or HotSync to retrieve new blog entries. After trying it out for a couple of days, I am totally hooked. I used to buy a copy of New York Post to read on the train to/from work. I am just glad I don’t have to spend another dime on it from now on.

I am a big NBA fan. But I’ve never really watched a game live in an arena, until last night. I went to Madison Square Garden to watch the game between Houston Rockets and New York Knicks. It was really nice to see Yao and T-Mac playing up close. There were some unbelievable moments. During one play, when Yao was trying to put in a layup, the 5-9 Nate Robinso rose above the rim to block it. The whole garden just roared.

But with the way the Knicks are playing these days, almost every team gets a win at the Garden. It doesnt matter how spectacular a single play is. It was Yao who got the last word as the Rockets defeated the Knicks 97-90.

There’s an interesting article from today’s New York Times. It talks about how web companies nowadays can be started cheaply. This is nothing new. But it is the first time it got major media coverage. Meebo, one of my favorites, gets the first page mention with a big photograph of their founders.