Back when the New York Times launched their social networking site TimesPeople we agreed to give it a whirl but expressed hesitation over adding another social networking start up to our list — why bother when Facebook was such familiar, user-friendly, one-stop-shop? Well looks like the Times may agree with us — at least about the friendliness part. Turns out earlier this month in the heady days following the election before we all returned to the reality of the Depression 2.0 the Times took out an exclusive ad on the front page of Facebook, which included a brief video of Barack Obama and an invitation to submit comments. The ad was apparently seen by 68.3 million people, and received 34,000 comments. Voila! According to an internal memo the Times quadrupled the numbers on their Facebook fan page.

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So this morning when we clicked on to the New York Times homepage to read the morning financial doomsday headlines we were greeted with something new: Timespeople has arrived! For everybody! Timespeople, for those of you not already familiar, is the NYT answer to social networking, wherein you can share reccomendations and comments, etc. We recall thinking it was a rather good, though possibly tricky, idea when we first heard about it last May — since then we’ve been invited to so many social networking start ups we’ve lost track of who we’re supposed to be talking to where and have retreated back to the familiarity of Facebook (notwithstanding the current mutiny over their redesign).

However! We read the Times every day so we decided to give it a whirl. Who knows maybe MoDo is lurking somewhere out there just waiting for us to friend her or whatever it is people do on Timespeople.

Update: The NYT delivers! Help, that is. Check the comments section for an explanation of how to create a “feed.”

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Have you heard? Social networking is all the rave (along with tumblrs and twitters). The Times launched TimesPeople last month, and rumor has it that Wired‘s Chris Anderson has something in the works. But it doesn’t end there! The Deal is reporting that Social|Median, the social news service founded by former Jobster.com CEO Jason Goldberg may be one step closer to launching.

The site, currently in its alpha stage, is described as being a “new type of hyper-personalized social news service,” (perhaps a combination of Facebook and Digg?) and is hoping to go beta in the next few weeks. Over the last few months it has picked up a number of high profile media investors, including former Federal Communications Commission chairman Reed Hundt, Julius Genachowski, the co-founder of LaunchBox Digital, the Washington Post Co.’s Allen Morgan, and most recently L. Gordon Crovitz, who stepped down as publisher of The Wall Street Journal in January (maybe Bonnie Fuller‘s invite got lost in the mail?). Hopefully we’ll be able to give it a whirl and get back to you.