Jan

4

Daylife: A Quick Review

January 4, 2007 |

Mike Arrington rips into Daylife today in his review on TechCrunch, even though he has made an investment into the company. I almost wonder if he is so negative because he has been accused of favoritism one time too many. Jeff Jarvis, also involved with the company, has a more even-handed review. Liz Gannes of Gigaom calls it a

meatier version of aggregators such as Google News, Topix.net, and Techmeme, offering tools for pivoting around information by story,
characters, time, popularity, photos, and quotes, in a wide range of news categories.

Funded by old media and new media alike — “roughly twice as many investors as it has employees,” says paidContent — the company is perhaps best known for the involvement of media guru Jeff Jarvis and media bogeyman Craig Newmark.

Daylife is basically a news aggregator. One of the facts that Arrington highlights is that it doesn’t feature an RSS feed. He likens it to “buying a car without a gas pedal,” a comparison I find ridiculously wrong. As a news site that wants to display the context of the news, an RSS feed is really not necessarily a good way of displaying information. The RSS feed for TechMeme, for example, isn’t very useful either.

I think a lot of the thinking about Daylife has to do with being canonical about what a Web 2.0 project should look like. Daylife is refreshingly different. No comments, no RSS, just a clean, simple interface to the browse the news as chosen by editors (gasp!).

I, for my part, appreciate that.

Instead of ripping into the Web 2.0-ishness of the site, here are some criticisms I have:

  • World news tends to be mostly US news
  • the opening flash page with the pictures is a nice idea, but looks too much like a flash intro movie and might lead lots of people to just click away in disgust (oh, and that picture of Negroponte looks a lot as if he just died)
  • I like the quotes when looking at the articles, I don’t think the quotes on the front page add much
  • I like the layout, though it would be nice if the shortcuts to the different sub-sections (World, Business, Science etc.) would always stay visible

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2 Comments so far

  1. kenji mori on January 4, 2007 9:36 pm

    I wonder if there is any systematic reason why RSS feeds don’t fit well with such news aggregation site. fyi, ohmynews.co.jp launched in JP a few months ago does not have RSS either.

  2. Frederic on January 4, 2007 10:12 pm

    Kenji - I wonder about that, too. I think it is simply a question on RSS being a great tool for serial information such as blog posts, news items, alerts etc. It does not work well for displaying information that is in flux, where relationships might shift over time, or even more generally, where relationships matter.

    That’s not a problem, I think, given that RSS is a ’simple’ format by design. Somewhere in the back of my mind I remember a discussion on TWIT or the Gillmor Gang with Gabe Rivera of TechMeme where he discussed this issue and at the time, nobody seemed to know what to do either.

    Maybe some kinds of information are just meant to be looked at in a browser and not in an RSS reader.

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